The Horrors of an Online Musical

By: Ina Mamba

This year, despite the distance and social restrictions preventing students from interacting face-to-face, annual projects like the Jukebox musical are still managing to push through — much to the shock of the Juniors tasked with curating it. The musical will be a 30-minute edited video; a short film of sorts. Though, that may not appear to be much of an issue with the evident perks of being able to re-do scenes and insert more ambitious effects; in addition to the evolution of the play into a musical “movie” Certain creative freedoms exhibited by past batches were no longer retained for this school year. One notable change is the narrowing of storyline options to those with themes relating to texts explored during the 11th graders’ 21st Century Literature class. These themes range from authoritarianism, innocence, revolution to desperation, and sacrifice. For the production, the music categories were also limited to purely Original Filpino Music with the options for each being either Manila Sound (70s-80s Filipino Jams) or contemporary Filipino music.

In the end, 11-Castitas was assigned to curate a Jukebox musical using contemporary Filipino music while 11-Frenum had been assigned to use Manila Sound. In exchange for certain creative freedoms, restrictions like the limitation to one artist have been lifted from Jukebox guidelines to assist students in creating a more cohesive song playlist for their productions.