Ciara Sotto’s South Pacific Comeback Has Four Shows Left Before It’s Gone for Good

This week is your last chance to see South Pacific — UST Conservatory of Music’s 80th-anniversary comeback, still featuring Ciara Sotto and Jose Vera Perez.

Paolo O’Hara directs and Daniel Bartolome leads the University of Santo Tomas (UST) Symphony Orchestra from the podium, same as the original February run. What’s playing this week at the Proscenium Theater in Rockwell, Makati is the exact production the Conservatory mounted for its own 80th anniversary — brought back now for four final shows before it closes for good.

Four shows remain: Friday, September 18 at 7:30 PM, Saturday, September 19 at 2 PM and a 7:30 PM gala, and a closing Sunday matinee on September 20 at 2 PM. Opening weekend, September 12 and 13, already happened.

The Song Broadway Wanted Cut

South Pacific carries more weight than a musical most people only half-remember from an old movie compilation. It premiered on Broadway in 1949, adapted from James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific — itself a Pulitzer Prize winner — and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama on its own, plus ten Tony Awards, Broadway’s top theater honor. Set among American servicemen and nurses on a Pacific island during World War II, the plot follows a nurse who falls for a French plantation owner and recoils from his mixed-race children, and a Marine lieutenant who can’t bring himself to marry the Tonkinese woman he loves. The musical’s most enduring standards are on the setlist here too: “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Bali Ha’i,” “Younger Than Springtime,” “Happy Talk.” The song that made the show matter, decades before “representation” became a marketing word, was “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” the lieutenant’s number about how prejudice is taught. Producers pressured Rodgers and Hammerstein to cut it before opening night. They refused, and it’s stayed in every production since, including this one.

Why a Conservatory Born After the War Chose a War Musical

That history explains why UST Conservatory of Music chose this specific title for its 80th year. The Conservatory traces its founding to March 1946, its first concert staged only months after the University of Santo Tomas reopened following Manila’s liberation from Japanese occupation — the campus itself had served as an internment camp during the war. Eighty years later, the Conservatory’s dean, Maria Alexandra Chua, has said the choice wasn’t nostalgia: a musical about wartime prejudice and interracial love, written by veterans of the same era, “resonates with our experience.” A school founded in the aftermath of a WWII occupation is staging the Broadway musical that WWII produced, for the anniversary marking how long it’s been rebuilding since.

Who’s Actually Onstage

Ciara Sotto — daughter of former Senate President Vicente “Tito” Sotto and actress Helen Gamboa, part of one of Philippine showbiz’s largest families — has been a fixture on Philippine television since she was six years old, moving between hosting, acting, and recording as an adult. Jose Vera Perez brings the classical training side, billed as a composer and music director as well as a performer. They’re joined by Nenen Espina as Bloody Mary and Sean Nolasco as Lt. Cable, with the comeback run adding a new credited partner: the University of Santo Tomas College of Commerce and Business Administration, alongside the Conservatory of Music itself.

South Pacific Poster — This is your last chance to see South Pacific.

Getting a Seat Before It Closes

Tickets run through ticketbooth.ph, priced from ₱1,000 (Dress Circle Sides) up to ₱5,500 (Orchestra Center), with Dress Circle Center at ₱2,500 and Orchestra Sides at ₱4,500. Students, seniors, and PWDs each get a discount — 30% off with code STUD30 for students, 20% off with SENC20 for seniors, 20% off with SPWD20 for PWDs — with a valid ID required at the door. Groups booking 50 seats or more get a flat 30% off. The Proscenium Theater is inside Rockwell Center in Makati City.

Four performances are left, and there’s no scheduled next date after that. The production that took eight months to come back around doesn’t have another announced run once Sunday’s matinee ends.