Two months after becoming the first Filipino to win Man of the World, Oliver Eugen Kretz talks to ELYSPLANET about what winning actually built — and whether it outlasts the crown.
Alex Eala got the rematch she wanted. The ending, however, came sooner than either player planned. The 21-year-old Filipina tennis star advanced to the Round of 32 at the Cincinnati Open in the early hours of Sunday, Aug. 16 (Manila time), after Elena-Gabriela Ruse, the Romanian she’d lost to in her only previous meeting with the player, retired with an apparent right ankle injury while Eala led 6-1, 3-0. It was an emphatic start. Eala dropped the opening game, then reeled off nine of the next ten to seize control of the match. Ruse called for a medical timeout after falling behind 3-0 in the second set to have the ankle taped, and play was suspended shortly after for lightning. She retired before it could resume, handing Eala the win 6-1, 3-0 (ret’d). The result evens their head-to-head at 1-1. Ruse beat Eala in their first meeting, at the 2024 US Open qualifying tournament — a match Eala had led before Ruse rallied to win in three sets. This time, Eala never let her settle …
In October 2024, Angelica Lopez narrowly missed the semifinal cut at Miss International, finishing outside the Top 20. She didn’t get another crack at that specific pageant. What she got instead this August was a brand-new one: Reina Filipinas’ first-ever Grand International crown, and with it, a second international shot, this time at Miss Grand International in India this October, with the exact date still unannounced. Most coverage of her Aug. 7 win at the Newport Performing Arts Theater treated it as a launch-night story about a franchise that changed hands under complicated circumstances. That’s a real story, and worth knowing. It’s not really her story, though. Hers is about what happens when you’re told, more than once, that you don’t look like the answer — and you keep entering anyway. Three Pageants, One Answer She Refused to Accept Lopez has now taken this particular road four times. She placed Top 16 at Miss Universe Philippines 2022. She won Binibining Pilipinas International outright in 2023, beating a field that included Katrina Anne Johnson — now …
A difficult play about addiction, recovery, and the stories people tell about themselves has arrived in Manila for a run that is almost absurdly brief: four performances, across two days, this weekend. The Sandbox Collective’s staged reading of Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places & Things, a winner of two Laurence Olivier Awards, opens August 15 at The Black Box at Proscenium Theater in Rockwell and runs through August 16, with performances at 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. The production stars Jake Cuenca, Gabby Padilla, Bela Padilla, Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo, and Audie Gemora, with Bela Padilla making her theater debut. That compressed schedule is part of what makes the production interesting. This is not a months-long commercial run designed to ease audiences into a new title. Manila gets four chances to see it. Macmillan’s play follows Emma, an actress whose life has begun to collapse under addiction. After entering rehabilitation, she finds herself forced to confront not only substance dependence but the versions of herself she has built around other people, her work, and the stories she tells …
Lanelle Aira Cajucom now holds a national crown. Now comes the hard part. On Friday night, August 14, inside the Robert B. Estrella Sr. Memorial Stadium in Rosales, Pangasinan, the Nueva Ecija representative was named Miss Pearl of the Orient Philippines 2026. Mariel Baltazar, the outgoing 2025 titleholder, crowned her. It was a tidy transfer of power for a pageant that is still young enough to be defining itself as it goes. Launched in 2024 by Oriental Beauty Philippines Charities Inc., Miss Pearl of the Orient Philippines has positioned itself around female leadership, cultural preservation and community service, with the motto Service Beyond the Crown. The organization was founded by pageant director Makoy Manlapaz of Gouldian Training & Events and JM Robles of JM Pageantry Innovations. But Miss Pearl is also becoming a pathway to a much bigger stage. Its inaugural winner, Krishan Pauline Alerre, represented the Philippines at Miss Aura International 2025 in Antalya, Türkiye, and won the international title. A year later, Baltazar returned to the same competition hoping to make it two …
Katrina Anne Johnson has thirteen dogs. Not adopted-on-a-whim, telegenic-puppy dogs — a mix of senior dogs, rescues from abuse and neglect, animals with special needs, one who gets around in a wheelchair. She’s a licensed pharmacist from Davao who spends her actual working hours dispensing precision, and outside of it, spends her time and money on the animals nobody else was going to take. That combination — clinical patience professionally, hard-earned patience personally — is the through-line of how she actually became a titleholder, and it’s a more interesting story than the one usually told about her. The short version most coverage runs with: Johnson won Binibining Pilipinas International 2025, becoming the first candidate from Davao to hold that specific crown, and she’s now bound for Miss International 2026 on Nov. 25 in Tokyo — one of six Filipinas carrying a national crown into an international final this year. The part that gets skipped is that this wasn’t her first attempt at the sash, and the version of her that lost the first time is …
There are easier ways to introduce the Philippines to a foreign audience. You can lead with the beaches. You can lean into fiestas, hand-woven barongs, and the familiar inventory of tropical abundance and radiant Filipino hospitality, polished just enough to clear customs without raising an eyebrow. Ea Torrado’s Brown Madonna chose something considerably less tidy. Following its world premiere at the Sincerely Yours, the Philippines festival at Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt in September 2025, and a European run this June that included Berlin and Braunschweig, the full-length dance-theater work is finally returning home. It will be performed August 15 and 16 at Myra Beltran Dance Forum in Quezon City, as part of Daloy Dance Company’s 12th-anniversary season. What the work brings back across borders is not a tourist souvenir. The Altar and the Arena At its core, Brown Madonna is about the contradictory jobs Filipino women are expected to perform: mother, martyr, entertainer, saint. Torrado gets there through Catholic iconography, pop culture, labor, sexuality, class, family memory and the particular Filipino talent for putting the …
The habagat has a way of making familiar places unfamiliar. In Noveleta, Cavite, the Ylang-Ylang River rises and roads turn into waterways. In Barangay San Antonio I, residents know what comes next: moving appliances, lifting mattresses, getting whatever can be saved above the waterline. During the latest flooding, the water rose to more than six feet in parts of the neighborhood. But one residential alley had a plan for it: steel gates built by the people who live there. It Started With One Gate The first wooden version appeared in 2020, when one household tried to keep floodwater from coming through its doorway. By 2023, King Nazareth Dayao Co’Arle had upgraded the design with a steel frame and rubber seals, making the barrier sturdier and tighter. What began as one household’s solution eventually became something bigger. For 2026, the goal was simple: get gates to 50 residents in the community. The funding mechanism was even simpler. Residents pooled money through a ₱5,000 ambagan, allowing more gates to be built along the residential alley. Today, the …
For seventy years, the Philippines has engaged in a very specific, deeply online parasocial relationship with the Eurovision Song Contest: watching from the glowing rectangle of a laptop screen while Europeans in wind machines scream about peace, love, and pyrotechnics. We never competed, of course. That never stopped us from claiming them anyway. Take 2025. Johannes Pietsch, better known to the internet as JJ, swept the Basel grand final for Austria with “Wasted Love,” a performance built around a countertenor range that could shatter fine crystal. The official scoreboard marked him down for Vienna. Twitter, however, immediately drafted him into the pantheon of proud Filipino excellence. One of ours had won the whole thing, except officially, he was waving someone else’s flag. That little loophole is about to close. On August 30, ABS-CBN is staging Pili, Pinas!, the national selection for the inaugural Eurovision Song Contest Asia. Ten entries are fighting for the country’s maiden ticket to Bangkok, where the grand final lands on November 14. The full tracks drop on August 17. For once, …
Days after SB19 took the Allianz Stage at Lollapalooza, the Philippine Senate has entered the story. Not with another performance. With paperwork. Senator Paolo Benigno “Bam” Aquino IV filed Senate Resolution No. 545 on July 31, one day after SB19 became the first Filipino act to perform at Lollapalooza. Senator Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan followed with Senate Resolution No. 573 on August 4. Both measures put the group’s Chicago appearance into the machinery of the Philippine government, where a festival set becomes something considerably more official: a matter for the legislative record. SB19’s Lollapalooza performance was, first, a pop-culture event. It was a major American festival slot, a milestone for Filipino music, and another step in a global run that has increasingly made the group look less like a local success story and more like an export. Now it is also a Senate story. From Grant Park to the Senate Record Aquino’s resolution recognizes SB19’s Lollapalooza appearance as a significant milestone for Filipino artists and Original Pilipino Music on the global stage. Pangilinan’s resolution similarly describes …
