GLAM: A New Chapter to Happily Ever After
By: Camila Isobel F. Salvador
New beginnings to closed stories, life to the icons of ever after, and retellings of the Tales of the Brothers Grimm all seen in Teatro Paulino’s Grimm’s Living Art’s Museum (GLAM) held last January 23 & 25, 2024 at the Pere Chauvet Hall.
This year, Teatro Paulino chose to embody the stories of Brothers Grimm as theme for this year’s production of their annual Living Art’s Museum. Little Red’s Hood, Rapunzel’s Golden Hair, the dark fairy’s sleep-inducing Spindle, Cinderella’s Glass Slipper, and the Evil Queen’s Magic Mirror — with 5 iconic artifacts from our favorite fairy tales and The Pied Piper as tour guide to help us navigate through each story, the play had the delving deeper and deeper into the museum’s stories.
GLAM showed the darker perspectives of beloved children’s tales by giving a story to the objects we know from the tales they act as symbols to. It gave these objects sentience in stories where they were nothing but objects all while showing just how dark these stories truly were despite being known as Happily Ever After’s.
The play had graced our school on two separate occasions, with two sets of actors for each story — one for each of the show dates.
The museum started with Zoe Perez and Gabrielle Magpayo giving us a chilling retelling of the story of the Red Hood; this is followed by a story of doomed love by Nathasia Wilczynski and Jay Amor as the Golden Hair. Next was Xyris Saculo and Alexa Perez acting as the Spindle retelling the disgrace that awoke the Sleeping Beauty. Afterwards we saw Daphne Laoang and Jules Pimentel who both gave an eye-opening monologue as the Glass Slipper from Cinderella. The last artifact was Cameron Garcia and Ysa Cayaba and their heart-breaking portrayal of the Magic Mirror. But these artifacts are not all of it as we must not, no, never forget Samantha De Castro and Athena Canezal as the museum’s scorned tour guide, The Pied Piper.
The performers had shown their great abilities as the members of the production had done an astounding job with creating the atmosphere. But, of course, that is not without the spectacular world building and directing of the writers and directors of the show. They definitely showed the theme that they were going for by putting these tales in a new perspective.
