Right now, in Quezon City, more than 11,000 people are still in evacuation centers. Habagat — the Southwest Monsoon, the seasonal wind system that dumps most of Luzon’s rain between roughly May and October — has spent most of August drowning Metro Manila in stages: chest-deep water in Sto. Domingo, suspended classes for over six million students, evacuation orders in Baguio and Ilocos Sur. It’s the same bad weather that pushed Manila’s & Juliet auditions off schedule weeks earlier, and it’s exactly the backdrop Ambon, Ulan, Baha was written for.

Ambon, Ulan, Baha — Tagalog for “Drizzle, Rain, Flood” — is returning to the Metropolitan Theater on September 26 and 27, and the timing isn’t the only reason it’s worth paying attention to. The 1970s ethno-pop-rock zarzuela, written by playwright Frank G. Rivera, is coming back to the exact stage it’s credited with putting dark, decades ago.

The Play That Closed the Theater

In 1992, under Rivera’s direction as founder and artistic director of Teatro Metropolitano, the MET’s resident company during what’s remembered as its Second Golden Age, this same musical played that same stage — and by the production’s own account, it was the last show staged there before the theater went dark. The MET didn’t reopen for good until December 2021, after a restoration led by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) — the government agency that has owned and operated the theater since 2015. Three decades later, it’s hosting the show that watched it close.

The 2026 restaging is presented by the NCCA and the Metropolitan Theater itself, produced by Pixel Art Media Production Co. It also folds into the 52nd anniversary of Sining Kambayoka, the pioneering theater company Rivera founded at Mindanao State University in 1974, known for the Kambayoka Theater Form — a style that blends Meranaw chants, folklore, music, and dance into something distinctly Filipino.

A Flood Written Before the Word “Climate Change” Existed

The plot: Nonoy (CJ Navato) and Inday (Thea Astley), two young lovers in the fictional Barrio Magubat, get swept up in promises of progress when a logging concession moves in, backed by the wealthy Don Calixto (Anton Juan) and his son, Doctor Anton (Rendell Sanchez). The forest gets stripped. Tradition erodes. Eventually, nature answers back with a flood that reshapes the town for good.

Rivera first wrote the material as Kaingin in 1976, part of a trilogy called Ang Hawla, before expanding it into the full zarzuela in 1978 — years before “climate change” entered everyday Filipino vocabulary. The warning it was making wasn’t hypothetical for long. On November 5, 1991, a flash flood tore through Ormoc City in Leyte in roughly fifteen minutes, killing an estimated 4,000 to 8,000 people. Environmental researchers later pointed to deforestation upstream — the same kind of unregulated logging Ambon, Ulan, Baha stages as its inciting act — as a major factor in how fast and how far the water rose. The play didn’t predict Ormoc specifically. It predicted the mechanism.

“We are no longer standing at the water’s edge,” CJ Andaluz, the production’s director and Pixel Art’s creative director, said of the piece’s relevance now.

New Staging, Old Warning

The 2026 production leans into modern stagecraft — projections, aerial sequences, and rain effects built directly into the Art Deco shell of the MET — under a creative team led by Andaluz (director), Rivera (playwright and principal composer), Pipo Cifra (musical arrangement), Anthony Cruz (choreography), Ohm David (production design), Raqs Regalado (costumes), Charlotte Despuez (lighting), and Roman Cruz (technical direction). The cast surrounding Navato and Astley includes Nazer Salcedo, Onyl Torres, Shermaine Santiago, and Sweet Buchanan, alongside an ensemble — the Taumbayan — that mixes alumni of earlier Ambon, Ulan, Baha runs with a new generation of performers, backed by the Koro chorus of Tanghalang Bagong Sibol.

The production also brings in Manlilikha ng Bayan (National Living Treasure) Rosie Godwino Sula, honored for preserving T’boli epic chanting traditions, to ground the show’s environmental message in an older, specifically Filipino register than “climate advocacy” usually gets staged in.

None of this is new territory for the piece. It’s carried a 2004 Aliw Award for Best Musical Production and a 2012 Fr. Satur Nery Environmental Heroism Award — recognition, on both the theater and the environmental sides, that arrived long before this particular flood season made the metaphor literal outside the theater doors. This is also the same city where & Juliet’s own Manila run had to work around the water this month — Habagat isn’t a metaphor for anyone staging a show in Manila right now.

Tickets, Dates, and How to See It

When: September 26 (2:00 PM ticketed matinee/press preview; 7:00 PM gala) and September 27 (10:00 AM, 2:00 PM, 6:00 PM — all ticketed).

Where: Metropolitan Theater, Padre Burgos Ave. cor. Arroceros St., Ermita, Manila.

Tickets: Reserved seating, ₱1,500; general admission, ₱1,000. Available via Ticketnation.ph.

Follow: Facebook and Instagram, @ambonulanbahamusical / @ambonulanbaha2026; TikTok, @ambonulanbaha2026; hashtags #AmbonUlanBaha2026, #AmbonUlanBahasaMET, #METNatinTo.