Top actors in ‘teleseryes’ fall short of thespic mark

COCO Martin should drop the artificial vocal technique in “Ikaw Lamang.”

The sad spectacle currently on view in most of local TV’s ongoing or concluding teleseryes is the sight of so many top actors falling short of the thespic mark. What seems to be the general reasons for this lack of authentic, dramatic believability and brio? Let us count the ways:

On “Ikaw Lamang,” Coco Martin’s delineation of young Gabriel is too similar to his characterization of Gabriel’s father, Samuel, in Book One—thus betraying the actor’s narrow range. This is surprising, because Coco is reputed to be one of our best young-adult TV-film actors.

Limited portrayals

We recall that, in another teleserye where he portrayed twins, he did quite well. Why then is he turning in limited portrayals in “Ikaw Lamang”?

It could be that, being not a very big or tall person, he’s trying to project greater heft and dramatic “substance” artificially, by coming up with a “deep and throbbing” vocal performance. He doesn’t just speak his lines of dialogue, he intones them, to make them sound appropriately dramatic.

Sadly, the artificiality of his vocal technique compromises the totality of his performance, so he should really just drop the unproductive vocal pose and go for real feeling and understanding—not the unreasonable and unconvincing facsimile thereof.

On “Ang Dalawang Mrs. Real,” the male lead player is Dingdong Dantes, and he started out well in the series. But, he’s since lost focus and conviction, and is now also pretty much just going through the melodramatic motions.

Last Sept. 18, Dingdong had a chance to redeem himself, so we excitedly awaited his depiction of a key moment in the drama, when he was the first in his family to be told that his father, played by Jaime Fabregas, had just died. This is the sort of “moment” that actors welcome and even embrace, because it gives them the artistic “obligation” and opportunity to go really deeply into their assigned character’s feelings. Unfortunately, Dingdong started to go for it—but visibly stopped short, and gave viewers only some aspects or prisms of his grieving and guilty character’s anguish.

DINGDONG Dantes lost focus and conviction on “Mrs. Real.”

As a result, the scene wasn’t played out in an integral whole, to show the character’s feelings in progressive “bloom”—but was cut up into snippets, with brief flashbacks of past scenes between father and son edited in to fully flesh out the very dramatic scene.

Too late

Toward the end of his edited montage, Dingdong did “break down” and his tears fell in a believable and pained rush—but it was a bit too late.

Next time around, he should really just believe in the “terrible” moment, and go for it without hesitation—and the results should be more productively and movingly dramatic.

Finally, another “controlled” actor, Piolo Pascual, is similarly doing not so well on “Hawak Kamay”—but, in a recent demandingly dramatic scene, he did much better than before, by finally allowing his character’s deep feelings to show and “bloom.”

At the very last moment, however, he decided to not go emotionally “all the way.” Still, that recent scene heartened us, because it indicated that, with a little more honest “blooming,” Piolo could end up doing very well, indeed.