Shoot The Moon

Translations: German / Spanish

Hear Direk Freddie Santos

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The Queen called, how do you say NO? I had known Jacqui Magno, Asia’s Jazz Queen (back then, anyway), since my Repertory days when I would hang out after hours at the Ermita/Malate district falling in love with folk singers and vainly hoping to get picked up by a few. Something about fingers plucking guitars I found and still find really sexy.

Well, in between the folk singers, there would be jazz and in these intervals, Jacqui ruled. Impractical choice of genre, that’s for sure. Jazz is a low-seller in the Philippines catering to a highly dedicated but sadly diminutive market yet Jacqui with her mastery of scat, her punctilious musicality and her infallible sense of rhythm stunned the nation (and the region) into bated-breath awe.
And now, she wanted to do pop. Say again?! Pop and standards, would I direct it, please?

Why me??! I was still busy making my last-ditch efforts to be the World’s Most Fantastic Star Stage Performer, what do I know about this? But she was a friend and the show (not act or gig or set but a SHOW) needed a no-name director who’d settle for being paid half a peanut. Uh……..yes.
I’d LOVE to! (How the heck am I gonna do this?)

But did it, we did. Progressive new-wave singer Paola Luz (daughter of National Artist Arturo Luz and stage actress Tessie) produced the show just because well, she wanted to. Paola was pretty much like that when she was alive, delighting everyone with her quirkiness and creativity. She once did a whole concert backwards, starting with the encore and ending with the Opening Number. I miss her.

Anyway, in this show, Jacqui pretty much took charge of her repertoire and I just let her. At that time, I didn’t know a thing about song progression or sequence impact or climax/anti-climax…those cornerstones that keep the infrastructure of a concert standing proud. I knew the songs, I liked the songs and I helped her with some of her spiels, the whole time winging it like a duck selling himself as a turtle-necked swan.

The venue was the Cusco, a 200-seater lounge that was a super-hot spot for young adults back then (1983) located at the top floor of the Manila Midtown Ramada (no picture available). Jacqui had already decided on what would be the main prop of the set…a giant silvery, shimmery new moon that she could sit on when the song required it.

This was paltry, I thought. Between Baby Barredo in Repertory Philippines and Roxanne Lapus in SRO, I had gotten used to ornate sets and Minimalism was a word for crossword puzzles. But with a performing area that was 12 feet wide by 5 feet shallow and the new moon set occupying half of it, that didn’t leave me with much. So…hmmm…I looked up.

I noticed the ceiling was only about 10 feet from the floor and I thought, without thinking, let’s take a hundred sheets of white gift-stuffing paper, cut out holes shaped like stars and lightning bolts, trim the edges and tape one end to the ceiling letting the rest of the paper hang! Sounds like a high school prom, I know but ride with me on this.

After some puzzled looks from my assistants, armed with scissors and Scotch tape, we spent the afternoon of the show making what I thought would be a nice added touch to the place. Nobody told me it would be magic.

At 6pm, sound check and technical rehearsals done, Cusco turned on the air-conditioning. The vents were all over the ceiling and as the cool draft blew into the lounge, the one hundred sheets of hanging paper began moving in waves, like clouds on a windy night doing a slow but perceptible dance around a shimmering crescent moon.

As the audience came in, one by one they started looking up and noticing the paper clouds. Twinkles and smiles began appearing on their faces and a couple took some photos of it, an act that almost shocked me. After all, in the early 80’s, flash photography was NEVER allowed in the theatre! I wanted to grab a microphone and announce that Flash Photography was NOT allowed but then, something, I daresay Heaven, stopped me so I did something better. I kept quiet. Best thing I ever did.

Song by song, the concert unfolded and in my silence, I heard and saw a future for my life I never dreamed I would step into. So THIS is what a concert is like: NO FOURTH WALL. Every move Jacqui would make, everyone saw. Whatever she felt like saying, she said, regardless of what the written spiels were…and she said these words TO them, not for them. What the people heard, they received, and they gave back and this went on all night, this…this conversation, this COMMUNION. I had never in my life witnessed anything like this!

I don’t remember if Jacqui’s repertoire really worked. Pop and theatre were not well-journeyed grounds for her and the fact that her few jazz pieces still elicited the loudest applause showed she knew her market but they were pretty set on how they wanted to know her. I had never seen an audience with this much power, with this much involvement in a show. I always thought we performers had the power, what we gave was what you got and your job was to appreciate whatever we did.

But in this concert thingie, goodness, people reacted exactly as they felt…cheering when they wanted, as loud (or as soft) as they felt like, and gasp!…EVEN…TAKE…FLASH…PHOTOGRAPHY!
And through it all, Jacqui was just herself. Every vocal curl, every hand twitch (decades before Mariah Carey), every impulsive, instinctive scat…all her.

I never knew that on a stage, that place I had deemed my milieu, on a stage in front of strangers, on a stage where for years I had pretended to be one character or another, you could be…REAL.
I left Cusco that night and headed straight back to my theatre world but deep within me, I knew I would come back.

Direksions:

1. Look Up – Whether you take that as God or just the ceiling, when you’re not sure of the direction of your next step, it’s not a bad place to look. In looking up, if God is ready to bless you, you’re ready to receive the blessing. If the ceiling fan is about to fall, at least you were warned.
2. Look Around – This world is big. Do not let your ego and sense of control be bigger than that.
3. Look In – Open up to you. You could be your biggest surprise.
4. Look – Really helps to just shut up sometimes.