When I was six or seven, I had a Norwegian friend — Annie Burret Ivarsen — and the neighborhood kids and I nicknamed her Annie Batungbakal, just to make her feel like one of us. I don’t remember whose idea it was first. I just remember that it worked. She answered to it. It made her ours, in the small, uncomplicated way kids decide who belongs to a group. We’d sing the actual “Annie Batungbakal” song together every playtime, the two of us belting out a disco track about a Manila salesgirl neither of us fully understood yet, just because it had her name in it. Nobody asked if she sounded Filipino enough before we gave her the name. We gave it to her because we liked her.

I hadn’t thought about her in years — not until a rainy Saturday night at Newport World Resorts, watching a room full of people debate a very similar question about someone else entirely.

We started last night the safest way possible — with dinner, before the rain had a real chance to argue with us. A few of us from the blogging community met early at Happy 8, the Cantonese fine-dining spot tucked on the third floor of Newport Club at Newport World Resorts, the integrated casino-hotel-and-theater complex in Pasay City that also houses the Newport Performing Arts Theater (NPAT). Happy 8 has quietly built a reputation as one of the better Chinese restaurants in the city — dim sum, roast meats, the kind of hakaw and salted-egg prawns people specifically plan a trip to Newport around. We didn’t know yet how much we’d need that dinner as ballast for the rest of the evening.

By the time we were ready to head to the theater, Metro Manila was arguing back. The southwest monsoon — habagat, the seasonal wind pattern that pulls rain across the country from roughly June to September — was being enhanced last night by Typhoon Dolphin, which stayed offshore near Taiwan but still managed to dump enough rain on Luzon to trigger a red rainfall warning and flood a good stretch of EDSA and the side roads feeding into it. I had a genuinely hard time getting to Newport last night, watching the drive stretch the way it does whenever the city decides to test everyone’s patience at once.

So when we finally got inside and found the Newport Performing Arts Theater full — not half-full, not politely attended, actually full — it caught me off guard. I hadn’t expected a full house on a night the city was actively flooding. The show opened at 8:40 PM with the cast of Bongga Ka, ‘Day!: The Annie Batungbakal Musical setting the tone with “Beh, Buti Nga” and “Bongga Ka Day!” — a fitting choice, since half the point of the night was to get the audience humming along to songs they’d be hearing again from the same stage come September. It turned out the flood warnings hadn’t scared off a single person who’d already decided this was the concert worth getting wet for.

Three Original Voices, One Trip Back

I’ll say this upfront: I didn’t know much about Hotdog going in beyond the songs themselves. But the songs, it turns out, are the whole point — they’re the reason I could hum along to a set list I’d never consciously studied. Hotdog, the band formed by brothers Dennis and Rene Garcia in the 1970s, is credited as the driving force behind the Manila Sound, the musical shift that made singing in everyday Filipino — or blending Tagalog and English in the same breath — something artists could actually build a career on, instead of chasing a more “acceptable” Western sound. Those songs are the reason a whole packed theater could sing along without needing a lyric screen.

Three of the band’s original vocalists — Rita Saguin-Trinidad, Maso Diez-Rivera, and Gina Montes-Infante — carried the reunion part of the night. Rita opened her segment with “Superstar,” and the line “dati-rati’y ang pangit mo” — roughly, “you used to be the ugly one” — got the same soft roll of laughter from the crowd it always gets, the kind of laugh that only happens when everyone in the room already knows the punchline is coming. Maso followed with “Ikaw Pa Rin” — after every love that came before, there’s still only one that matters — and the sentiment landed exactly the way a room full of people who grew up on this catalog needed it to. Gina took “Panaginip,” Hotdog’s song about missing someone in your sleep, and brought up Aubrey Caraan to sing it alongside her, handing a very 1970s ache to someone who wasn’t alive for a single year of it.

Then the three of them came back together for what was introduced as one of Dennis Garcia’s own compositions — “You Make Me Blush (Parang Pulang Kamatis),” the tomato blush that gives the song its Filipino title. I’ve seen it described elsewhere as the band’s very first recorded original, though other accounts credit “Pers Lab” with that distinction instead, so take the “first song ever” framing as what was said from the stage last night rather than something I’ve independently nailed down.

The New Guard Learns the Old Songs

The four leading men of the upcoming musical — Sam Concepcion, Jeff Moses, Anthony Rosaldo, and KD Estrada — got their own block of the night, serenading the crowd with a run of Hotdog hits that included “Ikaw ang Miss Universe ng Buhay Ko,” the band’s very first mega-hit, inspired by the hype around the 1974 Miss Universe pageant in Manila and still one of the most recognizable Manila Sound songs ever written, along with “Pers Lab,” the swooning, loving-from-a-distance track that became the band’s first mega-platinum single. Watching four men who’ll be sharing that same stage in September rehearse the room on a fifty-year-old catalog was its own kind of preview trailer.

The concert’s own title track got its moment too. Rob Deniel took on “Manila” — the song that gives “Manila, Manila: The HOTDOG Tribute Concert” its name, and the one Dennis Garcia himself has called the mother of all their hits. Adie followed with “Bitin Sa Iyo,” the classic about loving someone who never quite let you feel loved back.

Miles Poblete — the last woman to carry the “Hotdog Girl” title before the band’s original run ended — got her own moment with “Saan Ka Na Kaya Ngayon,” a Dennis-and-Rene Garcia original that never became one of the band’s own chart-toppers but has quietly outlived plenty of songs that did, mostly through other artists picking it up over the decades.

Wilbert Ross took on “Sa Isip Ko,” a Dennis Garcia composition that most people know as Agot Isidro’s, not Hotdog’s — it was the song that launched her recording career when it came out in 1993 and became one of the defining OPM hugot ballads of that decade. Wilbert is reportedly releasing his own version through Viva Records (exact date still to be confirmed), and by his own account, he’s hoping the song does for him what it did for Agot more than three decades ago.

What struck me watching Wilbert and Aubrey and the rest of the current OPM names work through this catalog wasn’t really about who could out-sing whom. It was that none of them treated the songs like relics. Manila Sound songs were written to be sung along to in a jeepney, at a karaoke machine, at a wake, at a wedding — they were built for repetition, not preservation — and every performer on that stage last night seemed to understand that the job wasn’t to modernize Hotdog. It was to keep the songs exactly as sturdy and singable as they’ve always been, since sturdy and singable is what got them into two generations’ karaoke rotations in the first place.

The Musical Waiting in the Wings

The reason so much of the current OPM lineup was on that stage became obvious once you connected it to what’s opening next month: Bongga Ka, ‘Day!: The Annie Batungbakal Musical, staged with the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) — the long-running Filipino theater company known for its socially engaged, community-rooted productions — in partnership with Newport World Resorts, VIVA Communications, and The Philippine STAR. It’s slated to open at the same NPAT stage on September 18. Atasha Muhlach leads the title role, with Aubrey Caraan part of the ensemble cast — the same Aubrey who stood beside Gina onstage the night before, singing “Panaginip” a full generation removed from when it was written.

Annie Batungbakal, if you don’t already know the character, is a dispatsadora — a daytime saleslady — at a fictional boutique called House of Pasion, who spends her nights trying to earn a place in the Coco Banana disco circle, the real 1970s Manila nightclub that became shorthand for the era’s glamour, while chasing a dream of becoming a fashion designer. The role was immortalized on film in 1979 by the late National Artist Nora Aunor, who passed away last year — which means this musical isn’t just adapting a song, it’s stepping into a shadow with a specific, beloved shape.

Atasha’s casting hasn’t been uncontested. Some of the criticism has been the familiar nepotism complaint — she’s the daughter of Aga Muhlach and Charlene Gonzales, and one auditionee publicly said she never saw Atasha at the open casting call, which PETA later disputed by releasing photos from what it says was Atasha’s actual audition, praising her singing, dancing, stage presence, and chemistry with the rest of the cast. The other strand of criticism is about the accent — whether someone with Atasha’s more polished, “conyo”-coded speech pattern can convincingly play a barrio-rooted, working-class salesgirl who spends her nights transforming into a disco queen.

I don’t think that question has one clean answer, and I’d rather sit with it than pretend otherwise. Manila Sound itself was never a purist’s genre — it was built on Taglish, on code-switching, on the exact kind of blended, in-between Filipino identity that a strict “who’s authentic enough” test would have disqualified from the start. Atasha’s own history on that specific stage might matter more than her accent does: she made her theater debut at NPAT fifteen years ago, at nine years old, as Brigitta von Trapp in Newport’s staging of The Sound of Music. Whatever she brings to Annie, she’s not walking into that building as a stranger to it. Whether 2026 audiences read her twang as a flaw or simply as one more layer of an already-blended identity is going to be a matter of who’s watching — and I suspect the answer will look different depending on how old you are when the lights go down, the same way it did for me watching three different Spider-Men across twenty years.

The Annie I Already Had

That’s what I kept circling back to, sitting in that full theater — Annie Ivarsen, and how easily we handed her that name decades ago. “Annie Batungbakal” was never really a test of who counts as authentically Filipino, not in my six-year-old hands and maybe not now either. It’s a song about somebody finally getting let in — a girl who wasn’t fully accepted in the disco circle until she stopped performing someone else’s idea of glamour and just showed up as herself. We gave the name to a Norwegian friend without a second thought, because the name itself has always carried a kind of open invitation.

Whatever accent Atasha shows up with in September, I already know the character has room for it. She made room for a Norwegian kid on a Philippine street decades before either one of us had heard of Newport World Resorts.

---

The Details

“Manila, Manila: The HOTDOG Tribute Concert” ran Saturday, August 8, 2026, opening at 8:40 PM at the Newport Performing Arts Theater, Newport World Resorts, Pasay City, despite a red rainfall warning across Metro Manila that day from the southwest monsoon enhanced by Typhoon Dolphin.

Looking ahead: Bongga Ka, ‘Day!: The Annie Batungbakal Musical, staged with PETA in partnership with Newport World Resorts, VIVA Communications, and The Philippine STAR, opens at the same venue on September 18, 2026, led by Atasha Muhlach alongside Sam Concepcion, KD Estrada, Jeff Moses, Anthony Rosaldo, Jackie Lou Blanco, and John Lapus.

Where we ate first: Happy 8, 3F Newport Club, Newport World Resorts. Cantonese and Chinese cuisine, open 11 AM–2 AM, known for its dim sum and roast meats.