#TheaterPH - I Sat in a Roundtable With Five "Macho Dancers" and Left Thinking About Something Else Entirely
Poblacion has a way of humbling you before you even walk through the door. Halxyon Club at four in the afternoon, way before the crowd arrives, looks nothing like the version most people know from late-night stories. The lights are still up. The staff are still setting chairs. And in the middle of that quiet, five men are pacing their lines while a small group of press, myself included, waits to talk to them one on one.
I got invited to the media launch of LAST DANCE - HUBO'T HUBAD, and I'll be honest, I walked in expecting the usual press event choreography. Instead I ended up in a roundtable that felt closer to eavesdropping on something private. The format was simple. The five cast members rotated table to table, a few minutes with each group of journalists, so by the end of the event everyone in the room had a version of a one on one conversation with each of them. It's a small thing structurally, but it changes how honest people get. There's less performance in a five minute conversation than in a stage answer shouted across a press conference.
That rotation is also how I got to actually meet the men behind each character, and each stop at the table felt like a different register of the same story. Gerald Magallanes plays Ace, the fearless one, and it tracked instantly. A decade-plus into a career built on choreography and multiple Aliw Award nominations, he had the easy confidence you'd expect, but the moment the questions turned personal, he talked about pain turning into strength and laughter turning into armor, and suddenly the bravado made sense as something earned rather than performed. Paolo Domingo, who plays Jay, the dreamer, brought a different energy entirely, younger and more open, unsurprising once you learn he's also Halxyon's resident DJ and spends his nights reading exactly this kind of room. His character is chasing the question of how far he'll go for a dream, and talking to him, you got the sense he wasn't acting that question so much as still living inside it.
 |
| Gerald Magallanes as Ace |
 |
| Paolo Domingo as Jay |
John Segui, who plays Dodong, the heart of the group, was the one who made the whole table laugh within the first minute, then quietly shifted the mood entirely once the conversation deepened. He represented Cainta, Rizal at King of the World Philippines 2025, and there was something disarming about a pageant title holder being this candid about using humor to hide weight he's still carrying. Kriszan Manipon, playing Mark, the veteran, had the most measured presence of the five, which fit a character built around the question of knowing when it's time for your last dance. As an actor and improviser, he talked about the character's exhaustion less as tragedy and more as arithmetic, years of sacrifice quietly adding up.
 |
| John Segui as Dodong |
 |
| Kriszan Manipon as Mark |
And Robbie Padilla, who plays Rafa, the quiet soul, was the most unexpected casting story of the group, a photographer who has spent his career behind the lens and is now stepping in front of it. He said very little at the table, which felt entirely on brand for a character whose defining question is what happens when the music stops, and somehow that restraint told me more than a longer answer would have.
 |
| Robbie Padilla as Rafa |
What stayed with me most wasn't the steamy trailer or the monologue teasers. It was how consistently every single one of them, when asked what scared them most about this role, said the same thing without coordinating it. Not the emotional scenes. Not memorizing Jojo Urquico's dense, confessional dialogue. It was the nudity. Showing skin, they said, plainly, is the hardest part, not because of vanity, but because it strips away every other layer of performance you can hide behind. You can act your way through grief. You can't act your way through standing exposed under stage lights in front of strangers.
So they've been preparing the way athletes prepare for something they can't fake their way into. Strict diets, disciplined gym schedules, the kind of physical routine that turns a body into a costume of its own. But the more revealing prep, honestly, happened off the mirror. Several of them talked about doing real immersion work, spending time understanding the world their characters come from, not just memorizing motivation but sitting with the actual lived reality of men who dance for a living and what that costs socially, emotionally, financially. That's the difference between playing a macho dancer as a punchline and playing one as a person, and it's clearly the difference this production is chasing.
 |
| Jappy of JAPS Collectives |
That distinction seems to be the entire point of the play, and it's what JAPS Collectives wants audiences walking in already primed to notice. In conversation, one of the producers made it clear that the term "macho dancer" carries decades of reduction in Philippine culture, shorthand for a body, a spectacle, a punchline in someone else's joke. LAST DANCE is built specifically to sit inside that discomfort and ask you to look past it, toward the dignity, the sacrifice, and the very real cost of survival underneath the choreography.
It's also why the venue choice isn't incidental. JAPS Collectives was upfront that part of their intention in partnering with World Theater Productions Guam/Manila was to reposition Halxyon Club itself, pushing it beyond its reputation as simply a drag and nightlife destination and toward something closer to a genuine arts and culture space. Bringing in Jojo Urquico, a director with credits spanning Miss Saigon, Rent, and stages like the Göteborg Opera and Staatsoper Stuttgart, signals that ambition isn't just marketing language. This is his first time writing a play from scratch, after a career spent inhabiting other writers' words, and there was a visible charge in the room when he talked about finally telling a story that's entirely his.
I left curious, honestly, about how he plans to land it. The team shared that the full run time sits at two hours and twenty minutes with an intermission, enough space to let five interwoven lives breathe without rushing the confrontation everyone's building toward. And there was one detail from the launch I haven't stopped thinking about since. The cast warned, half joking and half completely serious, that the opening ten seconds of the show are not to be missed, something visual and specific that only the audience in their seats on time will get to see. For your eyes only, as they put it. Come late and you lose a piece of the story you can't get back.
Sitting in that room, listening to five men talk plainly about diets and discomfort and the particular loneliness of being reduced to a body on stage, it became clear that the real performance isn't the dance at all. It's everything they're doing to be seen as more than one, and whether an audience walking in for a spectacle is willing to stay long enough to notice the difference.
Comments
Post a Comment