Casting hits and misses

CAST OF “DOM.” Varied and textured in their styles and “projection.”

OUR RECENT piece on the importance of producers coming up with the right combination of talents for a new production has elicited requests for a follow-up piece on casting hits and misses.

Happy to oblige: As far as successful combinations go, we can cite the current theater hit, “Rak of Aegis,” with both mature and young “belters” doing full justice to the Aegis band’s lung- and throat-busting “explosions” of sound and music.

If its cast of actor-singers had failed to do “full justice” to the popular masa anthems, the show couldn’t have become the big sensation it still is, with its latest, 80-performance rerun.

We’re also feeling bullish about the prospects for success of a new Original Filipino Musical show, “DOM (Dirty Old Musical),” which will play at Music Museum from Sept. 1 to 10.

Aside from its many other plus points, the new production’s casting appears to be similarly spot-on, with five veteran male leads singing its ’80s anthems and vivifying its kaleidoscope of scenes that dramatize the mature male’s penultimate state of menopause, or climacteric.

The musical’s leads, Robert Seña, Nonie Buencamino, Michael Williams, John Arcilla and Ricky Davao, are exceptional as individual performers and should be great together, because they’re so varied and textured in their combination of styles and “projection.”

On the other hand, many examples of wrong casting abound, especially on TV, where teleseryes are king. They have become so popular and dominant that some glaring casting shortcuts or missteps have been made.

The latest example was evident recently on the new series, “Encantadia,” when it cast the key part of the newborn baby of Marian Rivera and Dingdong Dantes with a child that had distractingly oriental facial features.

As everybody knows all too well, both Marian and Dingdong are as tisoy and tisay as can be, so the inappropriate physiognomy of their new offspring was an unnecessary distraction.

Worse, when the girl grew up, she was played by an older child actress who was tisay to a fault—so, where did she come from?