Usually, when someone says “musical about a saint,” I reach for my inhaler.
It’s not the religion that gets me. It’s the performance anxiety. Mine.
It’s not because I’m anti-religion — I believe in guilt, so, by extension, I believe in God — but because I have a chronic allergy to sincerity.
But recently I met the Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, a saint with hiking boots and social conscience, brought to life by the University of Santo Tomas’ senior high in Verso L’Alto.
The production was equal parts faith, footwork and teenage energy, a homily with jazz hands by someone who likes his saints with soul, sweat and Spotify potential.
Lo, I went to the matinee godless and smug, assuming I’d sit through it with the same detached snobbery I reserve for miracles and political campaign jingles.
And, truly, two hours later, I was weeping in a dark auditorium. The curtain was called, and I sat unsure whether to clap or repent. So I did both discreetly.
It’s disorienting to leave feeling more spiritually accountable than you did after years of Catholic school.
That’s what Verso L’Alto does. It’s not your average student theater, where Joseph forgets his lines and Mary checks her phone.
It doesn’t challenge your cynicism. It takes it outside, baptizes it and sends it home barefoot.
There’s a reason most saints stay in stained glass. And the problem with dramatizing sainthood is that goodness, unlike sin, lacks plot.
Sins translate easily to stagecraft: Gluttony has costumes; pride, and monologues.
Holiness is quiet, interior and wildly unphotogenic. Unless, somehow, a miracle happens.
So, when UST’s youthful talent managed not to make it feel like spiritual homework with a dance break, you pay attention.
Somehow, watching teenies portray selflessness felt more suspenseful than Patinkin with a loaded gun.
There’s nothing more radical than teenagers who give a damn. These students didn’t act the part; they recognized it. Like it was a role they weren’t pretending to play, but trying on for size.
Clearly, God played favorites when handing out talent at UST. For goodness! How dare they?
If this is the generation that’s coming next, we might not be doomed, after all.
They’re not singing about better worlds. They’re rehearsing how to build them.
Directed by Remus Villanueva, Pier Giorgio Frassati (Eboy Fernandez and Ethan Diño) was a cheerful Catholic, who died young, gave away his lunch money, and never once sucker-punched anyone.
I’ve seen grown men fail with less material. But directing a musical about a saint? It must have been rife with potential smiting and challenge. Was Villanueva more afraid of offending the devout or boring the teenagers?
Villanueva must have the patience of a man who’s been to confession and meant it. The faith in teenage talent shows. So does theirs in him.
What he apparently understood is that teenagers are already wrestling with the big questions. He just gave them a stage to say them out loud--no, sing them in harmony.
There was nary trying to impress Broadway, nor a swipe at making saints out of students; the direction simply created a space where they can imagine becoming one.
Pier Giorgio was humble, charitable and devout — none of which scream “showstopper.” How did he and his wards translate something so unabashedly abstract into something visually and theatrically compelling?
The script was the latch, the thing that let the divine sneak into the auditorium unnoticed, disguised as dialogue.
Eljay Castro Deldoc didn’t write sainthood as a spectacle. He wrote it as struggle, tension and a kind of luminous awkwardness, exactly how it feels when you try, sincerely, to be good in a world that finds holiness vaguely embarrassing.
Pier Giorgio isn’t canonized here. He’s rendered: Just a kid with faith, khaki shorts and something good in his eyes.
The result: A script where grace feels possible, and virtue finally gets some decent lines.
There are moments of genuine humor, pain and humanity.
Because Verso L’Alto is less about acting holy and more about practicing it — awkwardly, earnestly, beautifully, like all of us, on our best days.