#TheaterPH - Manila Just Got Its Most Chaotic (and Most Magical) Theater Season Yet
There's a very specific kind of tired that hits after a full week of back-to-back meetings, the kind where even a barkada dinner feels like too much commitment. What you actually want, if you're honest, is to sit somewhere dark for two hours and feel something that isn't a Slack notification. Wonder, maybe. Or the kind of laughter that makes your abs hurt the next day.
This October and November, Manila is getting both, back to back, at the same venue.
GMG Productions has just confirmed its upcoming season at The Theatre at Solaire, and it's built around two shows that couldn't be more different if they tried. The first is a circus spectacle inspired by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, all soaring aerialists and impossible acrobatics. The second is a comedy about a play that falls apart, literally, scenery and all, in front of the audience. One asks you to believe in magic. The other asks you to watch magic collapse in real time and somehow finds a punchline in every collapse.
Cirque Alice opens the season from October 16 to 25, a two-hour reimagining of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland through aerial work, contortion, puppetry, and a soundtrack of classical music remixed for the stage. It's the Manila premiere for producers Simon Painter and Tim Lawson, the team behind The Illusionists franchise, and Painter has described Carroll's original stories as the perfect canvas for a production this eccentric and larger than life. Lawson, for his part, pitched it simply as the kind of show you take a date to, or your whole family, and either way you leave dazzled.
Then in November, the tone flips entirely. The Play That Goes Wrong runs from the 6th to the 22nd, arriving in Manila after more than a decade of sold-out runs across the West End, Broadway, and over fifty countries. The premise is almost absurdly simple: an amateur theater troupe attempts to stage a murder mystery, and nothing, not the set, not the props, not a single line, goes according to plan. What makes it work isn't chaos for chaos's sake, it's the precision underneath it. Every prop that malfunctions and every actor who forgets their blocking is choreographed down to the second.
GMG Productions founder Carlos Candal, who greenlit the pairing, put it plainly: he wanted two shows that had nothing in common except how completely they'd stick with people afterward. He mentioned bringing his own kids to see The Play That Goes Wrong in London and watching them lose it laughing, the kind of scene that made him call it one of the best introductions to live theater a family could ask for, six-year-olds and sixty-year-olds included. There's also a third act to this season worth knowing about: Harry Potter: A Yule Ball Celebration will run simultaneously at The Space at Solaire, marking the first official Harry Potter live experience in the Philippines.
Both productions land at The Theatre at Solaire in Parañaque, and tickets go on sale August 15 exclusively through TicketWorld. If you'd rather not compete with the general public rush, both shows have waitlists open now that come with 10% off and early access before tickets go public.
What's easy to miss in all the acrobatics and the collapsing scenery is that both shows are actually making the same argument, just from opposite directions. One says the world can still make you gasp. The other says even total disaster can be the funniest thing you see all year. Either way, you leave the theater having felt something you didn't plan for on a random Tuesday, which, if we're honest, is the whole point of buying the ticket in the first place.
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