Klaus Döring's Classical Music/Klaus Döring's Klassische Musik

Thursday, March 12, 2026

At the heart of Theatre Group Asia’s production of ‘A Chorus Line’

The “” cast

As March signals the shift in the weather, it was a hot morning heading towards the Samsung Performing Arts Theater in Circuit, Makati, for the media event of Theatre Group Asia’s (TGA) first production for 2026, “A Chorus Line.”

The musical—conceived by director and choreographer Michael Bennett with music by Marvin Hamlisch, lyrics by Edward Kleban, and based on the book by James Kirkwood Jr. and Nicholas Dante—has garnered nine Tony Awards out of its 12 nominations and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. And currently, “A Chorus Line” is celebrating its 50th anniversary.

The musical is set in an audition. The dancers perform the opening number, and after the initial cut, only 17 dancers remain. The director, Frank, then tells them he only needs a strong eight-member dancing chorus: four women and four men. He calls them up one by one to share their stories as he wants to get to know them before making his final decision.

The lobby of the Samsung Performing Arts Theater was filled with dancers stretching and practicing their routines to help create the atmosphere and mood for the show. An extensive audition process was held to find the Filipino cast that went through Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao, and as far as the United States and the UK.

As the program starts, associate director of the show, Jamie Wilson, plays host and introduces Frank—played by Tony and Grammy award nominee Conrad Ricamora—who then begins a special preview that includes a parade of the seventeen cast members. They do parts of the show and perform four song numbers to a keyboard played by the show’s musical director, Farley Asuncion.

A timeless classic

On a personal level, I have loved this musical since I was a child. I used to sing and dance to the CD of the original Broadway cast recording and had to stop myself from singing along during the song numbers at the previews. The voices were strong, the harmonies were tight, and the emotions ran true. It was an exciting taste of what promises to be an electric show.

TGA’s production of “A Chorus Line” is choreographed and directed by Emmy Award winner Karla Puno Garcia. After the event, I was able to talk to Puno Garcia and ask her about her vision. As someone quite familiar with the material, I asked whether she would keep the original choreography, if she updated it, or if she created her own.

“I did a little bit of everything you just said,” she answers with a laugh. “I had a conversation with Baayork Lee, the original Connie [of the original cast in 1975], and I wanted to know what was important to uphold with the original choreography. So we talked about a few things; it’s really more about ideas.”

She adds, “In the opening, it’s about competition, and in the finale, it’s about being one and cohesive. So I wanted to uphold these ideas in the work and bring myself to it.”

“I am so sensitive about how music makes me feel,” she adds when I ask her about the number “The Music and The Mirror.” This is one of the show’s highlights, as it is a song performed by a character named Cassie—to be played by Lissa de Guzman, who has played Princess Jasmine on “Aladdin” on Broadway in the national tour and is the first Filipina to play Elphaba on the national Broadway tour of “Wicked”—a dancer who was moved from the ensemble to a feature role but has since been unable to find work. She wants to return to the chorus, even though Frank thinks she’s too good for it.

It’s a gorgeous song that escalates and has an exquisite dance break. “What I love about the choreography is the idea that it is in her head,” Puno Garcia continues. She talks about Michael Bennet’s original choreography and the idea that the dance break is an imagined performance—married with how de Guzman moves and how she herself hears and feels about the music.

Puno Garcia goes on to add that: “When I take on any project, I don’t want to deny my own instincts, so I follow them. I am very proud of the fusion that I have created with the material. I don’t think you can do any timeless piece of art without honoring the original way it was built. So that’s where I began, and then I built something on top of it with what I know.”

Very close to home

De Guzman, who only sang “The Music and The Mirror” at the media event, is a triple threat—a seasoned singer, dancer, and actress—who infuses the song with so much longing. I asked her if she had any connection to the musical prior to getting cast. “I got to work with Donna McKechnie,” she answers. McKechnie was the original Cassie on Broadway in 1975 and won the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical for her performance.

She continues saying, “That was really special—I did “Wicked” with her; she was one of our Madame Morribles—and then growing up I listened to the music, and I know the show.”

“Honestly, the role of Cassie is very real for me,” she shares. “I started off in the ensemble. I was a swing. I was in the ensemble. I was an understudy. I did all of that. Like Cassie, she got plucked from the ensemble and then went off to stardom, and she’s now returning to the line. I went off to do principal [roles] on Broadway, and I am now, truly now, returning to the line. Returning to dance. It is very real for me. It’s very close to home.”

A love letter to the chorus

For many of the performers, during the Q&A session, they reveal that they relate to the characters and the dramatic situation of the musical. Many of them cite specific performers—from the original Broadway cast, to the Broadway revival, and even the West End productions. Not only is the material something all theater performers can connect with, but the cast seems so aware of the show, all the way down to its history.

When asked about the challenges of directing 17 actors, Puno Garcia responds, laughing, “In theory, it does sound very difficult, right? But this is our life. It is so natural and organic the way that this material resonates. And at the end of the day, you let the text speak for itself. You let the right people speak it, and it kinda stages itself. You just let it breathe.”

“What I want to honor is the show as a love letter to the ensemble,” she adds. “That’s what the show is about.”

Wilson then asked everyone to describe the show in three or less words. Each cast member gave their own take, but it was swing member Franco Ramos who said, “universal,” which made the most impact.

Because this isn’t just a show about theater performers. The audition in itself is a dramatic situation. The show is about everybody who has ever had to apply for anything they really wanted—something that they were truly passionate about.

Wednesday, March 11, 2026

Max Steiner, the Movie Composer Injected With Amphetamines By Emily E. Hogstad

Max Steiner, the Movie Composer Injected With Amphetamines

By Emily E. Hogstad

Max Steiner, hailed as the “father of film music,” is one of the most influential composers in the history of Hollywood.

Over the course of a career that spanned half a century, Steiner crafted some of the most iconic scores in cinematic history.

Steiner was no stranger to the world of classical music. In fact, he took massive inspiration from Richard Wagner, his tutor Gustav Mahler, and even his godfather, Richard Strauss.

Today, we’re looking at the life of Max Steiner and his impact on the world of cinema…including the taxing work assignment with a deadline so tight, it required twenty-hour workdays and amphetamines to meet.

Max Steiner

Max Steiner’s Family Background

Max Steiner was born on 10 May 1888 in Vienna.

His family’s roots in Viennese arts and culture ran deep. He was named after his grandfather Maximilian Steiner, the theater director who popularised Viennese operetta and convinced Johann Strauss II to write for the genre.

Later, Maximilian’s son Gábor followed in his father’s footsteps and became an impresario himself.

Gábor’s wife Marie was also a music-lover and was a dancer early in her career, before giving birth to her only child, Max.

Max’s godfather was none other than composer Richard Strauss!

A Musically Precocious Childhood

Max’s voracious love of music was obvious from an early age. By the age of six, he was taking multiple music lessons a week.

He also started improvising on the piano, and with his father’s encouragement, writing the improvisations down.

At twelve, again with the support of his father, he conducted a performance of composer Gustave Kerker’s operetta The Belle of New York.

Max Steiner’s Musical Education

In 1904, he began attending the Imperial Academy of Music. While there, he was tutored by Gustav Mahler.

He breezed through four years of curriculum in one, studying composition, harmony, counterpoint, and a veritable orchestra’s worth of instruments.

Around this time, he also composed his first operetta, The Beautiful Greek Girl. No doubt to his disappointment, his father passed on staging it, claiming it wasn’t up to his standards.

Max rebelled by offering Greek Girl to another impresario. To his satisfaction, it was a success, running for a year.

Max Steiner’s London Career

The success of The Beautiful Greek Girl led to a number of conducting opportunities abroad.

A British production invited him to conduct The Merry Widow, an operetta by his father’s former colleague Franz Lehár.

Steiner moved to London and stayed there for eight years, conducting The Merry Widow and other operettas.

Escape to New York

Max Steiner

However, the onset of World War I brought his career to a screeching halt. Britain declared war on Austria in August 1914. Steiner was twenty-six years old.

Because of his nationality, he was interned in Britain as an enemy alien. He was only released because of his friendship with the Duke of Westminster.

Despite that friendship, he was ultimately ejected from Britain and his scores compounded, ending up in New York City with just $32 to his name.

A Broadway Career, and a Start in Film

Steiner soon found work on Broadway, orchestrating, arranging, and conducting. He conducted works by George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Victor Herbert, and others.

He began watching the development of the nascent movie industry with great interest, speaking to studio founders and directors about the potential of music to accompany silent films.

In 1927, he orchestrated and conducted a Broadway musical by composer Harry Tierney. When Tierney was hired by RKO Pictures, he urged the studio to hire Steiner, too.

At the time, the potential of movie music was yet to be fully understood. It was thought by studio heads that soundtracks should come from a library of cheap pre-recorded tracks, as opposed to being written for specific films (an idea that Steiner would push back hard against). Steiner was hired as the head of the music department at RKO, but only on a month-to-month contract.

He scored Dixiana, the Western Cimarron, and Symphony of Six Million. Symphony of Six Million, with its extensive score, was a landmark in cinema history, and it helped to convince film executives of the impact that a soundtrack could have on a movie.

Max Steiner’s Hollywood Career

King Kong

Throughout the 1930s, Steiner was on the front lines of establishing the language of movie music, influenced by figures like Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss.

He scored King Kong in 1933, finishing the iconic score in a jaw-dropping two weeks. It has often been called the most influential soundtrack of all time, demonstrating for executives, producers, and audiences once and for all what exactly a custom-written score could do for a movie.

Steiner relied on the Wagnerian idea of leitmotif, i.e., playing specific themes during the appearance of specific characters or ideas.

King Kong (1933) – Beauty Killed the Beast Scene

He also composed for and conducted many of the Astaire/Rogers musicals.

In 1937, Steiner was hired by Warner Bros, where he continued his extremely productive output.

Scoring Gone With the Wind

Gone With the Wind

In 1939, Steiner was hired by Selznick International Pictures to score Gone With the Wind.

He composed the score to the nearly four-hour film in three months. At the same time, in the year 1939, he composed the score for twelve other films.

Producer David O. Selznick had concerns that Steiner wouldn’t be able to finish in time, so he hired Franz Waxman to write a backup score.

However, it wasn’t needed. Steiner ended up delivering by working twenty-hour days, aided by prescribed injected amphetamines. He also had the assistance of four orchestrators.

Today, it’s widely regarded as one of the greatest film scores of all time.

Max Steiner’s Academy Awards

Gone With the Wind didn’t win an Academy Award for best score (it lost out to The Wizard of Oz), but over the course of his career, Steiner would win multiple Oscars.

In 1936, he won for his score to the thriller The Informer. In 1943, he won another for the drama Now, Voyager, and yet another in 1945 for the wartime drama Since You Went Away.

Other classics that he scored during this time include Casablanca, The Big Sleep, Mildred Pierce, and others.

Max Steiner’s Late Career

During the 1950s, changing tastes in movie music meant that Steiner’s lush, operatic style began to fall out of fashion.

He had one last major triumph with the theme for A Summer Place in 1959, which spent nine weeks at number one in 1960. It beat out Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, Elvis Presley, and Frank Sinatra at the Grammys for Record of the Year.

Sadly, his health and vision began deteriorating later in life. He died of congestive heart failure in 1971 at the age of 83.

Max Steiner’s Innovations

Steiner was one of the first composers to employ a measuring machine to guarantee exact timings in a score. Before him, most composers just used a stopwatch, but Steiner felt it was important to sync his score with the film more closely than a watch’s second hand would allow.

He was also among the first to embrace click tracks. A click track consists of a series of holes punched into soundtrack film, creating a metronomic effect. Headphones can then be used and instruments played along to an exact tempo.

Throughout his career, he was on the cutting edge of developing ideas and principles about what scenes should and shouldn’t have music in them, as well as how loud music should be relative to dialogue.

He was also fascinated by the power of diegetic music (i.e., music that is played within the scene, that the characters also hear). Think of the famous renditions of “La Marseillaise” or “As Time Goes By” in Casablanca.

Max Steiner’s Modern Influence

Max Steiner conducting the score of King Kong

Steiner’s influence continues even today.

John Williams has cited him (as well as Steiner’s compatriot Erich Wolfgang Korngold) as a major influence, as has James Newton Howard, who scored the 2005 remake of King Kong.

He also pushed for film composers to earn residuals, helping to create an expectation that composers would be fairly compensated for their work.

It’s clear that for as long as movies exist, Max Steiner’s influence will continue to be felt.

Sunday, March 8, 2026

AUDIOJUNKIE: Summer song surge

By Punch Liwanag

Recently, Donna Summer made a big splash into pop culture’s collective awareness by surging atop the Billboard dance charts with her classic 1978 song titled “MacArthur's Park.” Summer, who passed away in 2012 at the ageof 63, is one of the original divas of the disco genre. She was a few shy of her 30th birthday when“MacArthur’s Park” first became a hit. But this was after a long slog for Donna Summer, who first played in Europeas a theatre singer-actor in the musical Hair, and then as a recording artist, where she had her first real break working with producers, including one named Giorgio Moroder.

Donna Summer (Images courtesy of Facebook)

Written by Jimmy Webb, “MacArthur’s Park” was a 1968 song recorded by the actor Richard Harris (who played Dumbledore) and was originally a ballad. Moroder turned the song on its head, so to speak, and was instrumental in making this into one of Donna Summer’s biggest hits.

Hearing the song has again emerged to the top of the dance charts, not more than a fortnight ago, just got me waxing a bit nostalgic. The first time I heard “MacArthur’s Park” was not through Donna Summer or Harris’ original, but through a local rock band.

Believe it or not, it was The Dawn that I first heard this peculiar tune. Peculiar, because when Jett Pangan sang it, it stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb, only because I was more attuned to Jett singing “Love Will Set You Free” and “I Stand With You” than this melodramatic dribble about ‘melting cakes out in the rain’ which, ‘I don’t think I can take it / because it took so long to make it / and I’ll never have that recipe again,’ etc.

Cup of Joe

There’s an inherent kitsch in it. It was there when The Dawn covered it as an overture in their epic “Dream Storm” concert (back in ‘88), and it was there when Donna Summer sang it.

But man, was it epic! Especially with Donna Summer’s voice singing the dramatic, lyrical soliloquy, it was raised to a grander scale. I didn’t know then that Giorgio Moroder produced this, but hearing it at the recent Winter Olympics, I can recognize some of Moroder’s touch in the production. After all, Moroder’s own 1984 hit “Together in Electric Dreams” is one of my all-time fave songs from that amazing year in pop.

From Richard Harris to Donna Summer/Giorgio Moroder, to its recent resurgence thanks to the iconic Alysa Liu, “MacArthur’s Park” has had quite a 58-year journey.

Speaking of surges, the Viva Music Group is having a victory lap. The label is now behind the first two OPM songs to reach 500 million streams on Spotify in the Philippines.

“Tadhana” by Up Dharma Down is the first Filipino track to hit the half-a-billion milestone. Released in 2012, “Tadhana” is UDD’s most recognizable song in the alt-electronica band’s catalog. Viva Music Publishing manages UDD’s master recordings after Terno Records turned over its ownership.

And some bands have all the luck. Cup Of Joe now has the distinction of being the second act and the fastest to reach the 500 million mark for their song “Multo.” It is now the most-streamed OPM track in Spotify’s history and holds the longest number one streak on the platform’s Philippine Daily Charts. Maybe that’s why they’re all systems go in solo headlining the Philippine Sports Arena this coming May 23, 2026.

Yuja Wang magic

 Many people play this as an encore but her performance was perfect. She walks onto the stage looking like she is unsure of where she is. But once she sits down, its pure Yuja Wang magic.

Prokofiev Piano Sonata No. 7 in B Flat Major, Op. 83, III https://www.ganjingworld.com/s/OJar21gOnZ

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