“If you have faith, then it must be true,” says the man who has just extracted slimy gobbets of flesh from a woman’s abdomen with his bare hands and no incision. The gobbets, he says, are disease-causing “negativities,” though we know they are actually chicken guts marinated in fake blood.
Faith and faithlessness — in healers, in countries and even in art forms — are the ideas animating “Felix Starro,” an earnest world-premiere musical by the novelist and playwright Jessica Hagedorn (book and lyrics) and the composer Fabian Obispo (music). The Ma-Yi Theater Company production that opened on Tuesday at Theater Row is said to be the first musical by Filipino-Americans ever presented Off Broadway.
That’s no small thing, if the form is to keep from shrinking into a souvenir of itself. And there is much to like about a work that brings the tropes of classic musicals to a story about people usually ignored by them. But you may also find yourself wondering whether those time-tested techniques are really capable of doing justice to a story so unlike the ones for which they were devised.
That there are two title characters is emblematic of the opportunity and the problem. One Felix Starro is the faith healer himself (Alan Ariano): a man of about 70, once famous in his native Philippines for his “hands of power.”
“Is he for real? Of course he is!” runs one lyric in a flashback song. “Just ask the mayor of Manila or that doctor from Zamboanga or Shirley MacLaine.”
But now, sick, broke and on the run from relatives of relapsed customers, he depends more and more on the other Felix Starro: his 19-year-old grandson and namesake, called Junior. Over the course of a 10-day visit to San Francisco in 1985, Junior (Nacho Tambunting) helps his “lolo” set up shop in a grungy hotel room in the Tenderloin, where the older man hopes to serve the local Filipino-American community with “spiritual surgery” for “$200 cash only.”
Junior, who prepares the chicken guts and knows how quickly the “cures” wear off, has lost whatever childish faith he once had in his grandfather’s scam. Too mortified to take up the family profession and also unwilling to return to his “shantytown” existence in Baguio City, he has come to the United States with a different spiritual cure in mind. It’s no spoiler to say that it involves becoming an American. In the first full song, “Pocket Map,” the older Felix already guesses why Junior has been studying the streets of San Francisco as if they offered a clue and a direction.
Mr. Obispo’s music, in that number and throughout the score, makes sophisticated, wide-ranging references to Sondheim, theatrical pop, the Dies Irae and tango. But though Ms. Hagedorn’s lyrics often feature trenchant hooks, they seem to catch the same fish over and over. The ensemble numbers, including one (“Medley of Maladies”) in which we meet several hopeful if zombielike patients, grow repetitive, and the solos are too often muddy.
That wasn’t the case in the charming, troubling short story on which “Felix Starro” is based, from a 2012 collection called “Monstress” by Lysley Tenorio. As narrative fiction, it had no trouble dipping in and out of the singular consciousness — Junior’s — at its center. But musicals, by their nature, are mostly about communities; any character who sings is instantly characterized, poorly or well.
So just by faithfully translating the plot to the stage, Ms. Hagedorn’s version of “Felix Starro” slices our attention too thinly and evenly. We hear not only from Junior but also from Felix, various patients, a Mrs. Delgado (Francisca Muñoz) and her lawyer son, Ramon (Ryan James Ortega), Junior’s girlfriend back home (Diane Phelan), a florist who figures in Junior’s escape (Ching Valdes-Aran) and even a hotel housekeeper (Caitlin Cisco). Many of the songs are exceedingly well sung, especially by Mr. Tambunting and Ms. Cisco, who have the most biting material and are able to bring specificity and pathos to it.
Even so, too much of the writing — and a lot of the staging, by Ma-Yi’s producing artistic director, Ralph B. Peña — feels overwrought and generic, as if the marvelous novelty of the milieu (to non-Filipino audiences, anyway) had to be forced into customary formats. The choreography, by Brandon Bieber, is an odd pastiche of familiar gestures. The vocal arrangements, by Ian Miller, often involve disembodied backup singing that tries to gin up choral climaxes in the manner of megamusicals: an effect unachievable with a band of four and a cast of seven.
And where the playbook says you need a powerful, wide-screen summing-up anthem, “Felix Starro” dutifully shoehorns one in. Called “T.N.T.” — an abbreviation for the Tagalog phrase “tago nang tago,” meaning “hiding, always hiding” — it is about the plight of undocumented Filipinos taking on new identities and trying to keep one step ahead of discovery. Though moving and timely, the song has very little to do with the story we’ve been watching.
That story isn’t about hiding; it’s about desperate need and false miracles. If “Felix Starro” means to equate those elements with the dashed dreams of immigrants, scammed by a cynical, faith-healing America, it doesn’t have the right narrative to get there.
But I was nevertheless encouraged by its determination to see whether the form that has brought us “Oklahoma!” and “Sweeney Todd” and “Hamilton” can keep expanding in new directions. If it can, that would be a miracle worth believing in.
Felix Starro
Tickets Through Sept. 15 at Theater Row, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, ma-yitheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.
Felix Starro
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Jesse Green is the co-chief theater critic. Before joining The Times in 2017, he was the theater critic for New York magazine and a contributing editor. He is the author of a novel, “O Beautiful,” and a memoir, “The Velveteen Father.” @JesseKGreen • Facebook
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