At play with Audie Gemora
 |
| The King of Musical Theater: Audie Gemora says, “I think when you’re an artist, the most important thing for you is your craft. That you spend an awful lot of time perfecting your craft and getting good at it, and the popularity or the adulation of people is a result of the work you put out.” |
He has staged numerous plays ranging from the sweet and
colorful Little Mermaid to the controversial and sensual Equus, and has
mentored different generations of talent on both stage and television. He is
the president of Trumpets and Stages, an actor, a director, a father, and
everybody’s “Tito.” Here are 10 things you should know about Audie Gemora.
1. He was an average
student in high school. But one day, he went from being the most unpopular kid
in school, to being the “second most popular kid in school.”
“In the late ‘70s, nobody was into the arts. And our teacher
at that time, an American lady named Ruth Butler, recruited me to be part of
her high school musical. Ako naman, I didn’t have anything to do, I wasn’t
really into anything, I didn’t have very many friends,” recalls Audie of his
days in the International
School. He said he hid
out in the library most of the time, not because he liked books, but because he
didn’t want people to see he had no friends. Until he was introduced to
theater.
“We did a musical called Oklahoma and I played the kontrabida,” he
says of his first-ever role at 15. “The response was just tremendous. Parang
na-discover ko yung gift ko. Yun, tuluy-tuloy na, I became Drama Club
president. Then after high school, I wanted to see if I was still good enough
outside of school. There was the Manila Theater Guild, and that’s where I
started, I did Grease. And again, ang laki laki ng response. So every step that
I took just kept affirming that I had something special.”
2. On ego and the
theater world: “There was a point I was just this very mayabang golden boy of
Repertory.”
Audie: “Freddie (Santos)
and I have had so many fights.”
Bianca: “Sigawan?”
Audie: “Oh yeah. I would submit to him as my mentor, but I
would remember, two years older lang siya sa akin so di ako pwede masyado
apihin. It was also largely because I was a lazy S.O.B.”
“Being an artist is very self involved,” Audie admits.
“Everything revolves around you as a performer. Being an artist has a form of
immortality, that you create something, you perform something and it affects
people’s lives. They gather around you and idolize you. You get that feeling
that it’s all about you. But it’s also the most insecure position to be in.
“I went to the States to study filmmaking in NYU. All of a
sudden, this big fish in a small pond became this small fish in a big pond. It
was like, who was I? That started my insecurity. Pagbalik ko dito, I knew I
wouldn’t be happy just doing the same thing again. I was searching. I was really
searching for something.” That was when some friends brought him to church, and
that’s when his life changed.
3. Theater company
Trumpets was born in 1991 out of a group of theater friends and a reaffirmation
of faith.
“Friends led me to a church, and that’s when I became Born
Again. Mari Kaimo, Freddie Garcia, sunud-sunod kami,” Audie recalls. “And of
course being theater artists, our most immediate response was, how do we
express our love for God? Eh di yung talent namin.” Their group actually staged
two plays prior to putting up Trumpets — the comedy First Name and the musical
Joseph The Dreamer. “I think it revolutionized Christian entertainment because
up until that time, it was only kantatas or senakulos. This one was hip,
modern, the music was Gary V and Ogie Alcasid, and we put in a lot of hip hop
and comedy.” It was around 1997 when Stages, the events and talent management
company, was put up.
4. On art and
religion: “Art is supposed to reflect life. That’s where my Christianity
stops.”
“I guess I’m liberal in that sense,” Audie shares. “Being an
artist is the license, the privilege, the anointing of God to be able to
express what you see. You are supposed to reflect what you see in the world,
and that’s a gift. I don’t think anybody has the right to stop it, ban it, edit
it or censor it. If you don’t want to see it, you don’t have to. So it really
scares me when the Church gets heavy-handed.”
He reveals there was a time that he left Trumpets for three
years, because of the struggle between his being an artist and a man of faith.
“I went back to Repertory and I found myself again. I had lost myself for a
time, I lost the artist in me,” he recalls. “When you are supposedly a
Christian theater ministry, there are things that are expected of you by the
Church. But that’s precisely why I believe God got us to do this as artists. So
we would be out of the box, because how can we reach out to people who would
never be caught in a church to begin with, if we can’t be real? If we can’t
speak of their issues and reflect what they’re going through, right?” He
recalls a time someone questioned his staging of Little Mermaid because it was
about a “demonic character,” and another time someone told him he couldn’t play
his dream role, Sweeney Todd, because he was a killer. “I’m already in that
frame of mind that I think it’s the Church that needs to expand its mind. Your
testimony is how you live your life, it’s not the role you play.
“Yes, God is very important to me, but not in a way that
people could dictate. I would have to find Him in finding myself first. In
being honest to who I am, by being a good father maybe, learning to love
properly. That’s when I found who I was as a Christian again,” he adds. Audie
was once quoted telling the Church to “relax” during the issue of the
controversial art exhibit in the CCP, and was also a vocal supporter of the RH
bill. “Maybe that’s the reason bakit palaban ako sa ganyan, kasi pinagdaanan ko
yung struggle na yan.”
5. Audie Gemora in
numbers:100-plus: Number of plays watched
50: Theater productions done
4: Awards won for performing and directing (including Aliw
Awards Best Stage Director for Noli in 2011)
2: Number of dogs owned. “They’re aspins (asong Pinoy),
Skipper, who’s really furry, and Yuki, who looks like a Japanese Spitz. They
say when they’re rescued that they love the amo more.”
100: Number of opening night gifts in his collection. “Like
for Footloose, I got a cowboy boot. For Les Mis, I got a troll dressed as
Javert.”
120: Approximate number of hours it takes to prepare for a
play. “Around one month, four hours a day, and then eight hours a day during
production week.”
6. He has a
modern-day family. “My son has a mother and two sisters.”
“I saw this kid walking around the lobby of Meralco Theater.
I said, who is this? Whose kid are you?” Audie recalls the time he met Richard.
“He was like the Trumpets baby because his tita worked in Trumpets. He was being
brought there a lot and I just fell in love with him. It was at that point in
my life when I had achieved everything… And I always had this fatherly instinct
in me. When the boy was there, we just gravitated towards each other and it
became an instant bond. It’s amazing.”
Since Richard was two, it was Audie who would go to their
house to be a surrogate dad to him. Until 2009 when Richard was nine years old.
“I said, ‘Son, it’s time to live together.’ So I went back to the house and
took the whole family.” He says that Richard is starting to show interest in
theater, but as of the moment he’s much more into sports. “You’d think at 13,
mag-uumpisa na yung problema. He would tell me about classmates and what they
were getting into, and he’s not into it. I’m just so blessed. Ang bait bait na
bata.”
7. He is called the
King of Philippine Musical Theater, and was once actually in a five-year
relationship with the Queen of Philippine Musical Theater, Menchu
Lauchengo-Yulo.
“That started in Repertory, and we weren’t even acting
together. She’s very pretty, and we were barkada,” Audie recalls. On how they
were able to remain friends after: “I love Menchu! I think we just both
recognized that we were not for each other. But we remain very close.”
“Nangyayari kasi sa theater, nagsasama kayo madalas, so you
will get drawn to someone. In Trumpets, we have so many theater couples, and a
lot are married now.”
8. He once headed the
Talent Center division of TV5, but despite being a mentor himself, realized it
was not for him. “I realized hindi ako showbiz, I’m a theater person.”
“I had to follow the artist around, talk about their love
life, think kanino pwede ipares, pano magkakaroon ng intriga,” he explains.
“Sometimes you get lost and you think, ‘Wait, where does talent come in here?’
At one point it wasn’t even about the project anymore.”
On the difference between an artist and an artista: “I don’t
mean to demean artistas, and I hope I can make the distinction well so nobody
gets offended. I think when you’re an artist, the most important thing for you
is your craft. That you spend an awful lot of time perfecting your craft and
getting good at it, and the popularity or the adulation of people is a result
of the work you put out. In showbiz, it’s the complete opposite. You are now
dealing with a different market, and so it is personality-driven, looks-driven
and youth-driven.
“You can look at any talent center of the three networks.
There’s a big bench of talent there, and a lot of the talented ones aren’t
being used. For an artist like me, that’s hard to take,” he shares.
“Pero dito
naman ako bilib with artistas. Tatanggapin mo yung script ngayong araw,
tapos magsho-shoot na. Because you don’t have the process of creating your
character, you just need to now have a library of emotions that you just have
to pull out.”
9. He is now taking
his craft to the next level. Audie is putting up the Talent School
of Academics and The Arts.
“Playshop was a summer workshop we developed in 1993. We
wanted to make it different, so we were the very first to offer Musical
Theater, Hip-hop and Modeling,” Audie recalls. “As many as 2,000 students would
enroll and parents would tell us why not have it all year? We then put up
Musicademy that was year round, but nobody enrolled. I always had it at the
back of my mind that it was an unfinished formula.”
Fast forward to 2013, and as fate would have it, this June,
their school is opening. “It’s progressive. We will have dance, literature,
theater, visual arts and music. Then that’s parallel to the academic, which is
science, language, math, and other subjects. Those are the two pillars, and in
the middle we have our Art Integration Program. We will use the arts to teach
the subjects. For example, if you’re teaching the solar system to kids, you put
them in a dance and they form the solar system. Its experiential, they realize
the movement, rather than just memory work. Or for example history, instead of
struggling through voluminous books of Noli and Fili, experience life at that
time with theater. So you come to appreciate the characters of Rizal as real
people. The possibilities are endless.”
He strongly believes that if it weren’t for that happy
accident of getting recruited for theater in high school, he probably would’ve
become a bored haciendero. “I don’t want that to happen to other kids. I want all
children that will go to our school to have the opportunity to develop all
their talents.”
10. More than the
awards or the titles given to him, the biggest compliment he has received is:
“Uy, yung anak ko nag-Playshop.”
“I hear stories of parents saying their children gained
confidence or came out of their shell after taking our classes, and that just
gives me so much fulfillment,” Audie says with a big smile.
On making a name in Philippine theater: “It’s definitely
flattering, it’s an affirmation of my body of work. It’s also nakaka-pressure
because you have to live up to it. More than the awards actually, yung respeto
ng tao is something I really, really value.”
* * *
As I transcribed and wrote this piece on Audie, I looked over the course
of his life and career and sincerely learned two things. First, that it is okay
to do things that are out of the box, to define things differently from the way
convention defines it. And second, that it is okay to lose your way. Because
with the right mindset, you will eventually find yourself on the path where you
were meant to be.
