Tanghalang Pilipino’s first P-pop musical recasts Gregoria de Jesus as more than the Katipunan’s muse, and it has now outgrown two stages in a year.

“Gregoria Lakambini: A Pinay Pop Musical” debuted at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in November 2025, running from November 14 to December 14 at the Tanghalang Ignacio Gimenez as part of Tanghalang Pilipino’s 39th season, “Ignite.” It reran for two nights, April 11 and 12, 2026, at Hyundai Hall in Areté, Ateneo de Manila University. On November 13, it opens again, this time at the Proscenium Theater in Rockwell, running Thursdays through Sundays until November 29 as part of Tanghalang Pilipino’s 40th-anniversary “Past Forward” season. A third venue in about a year is an unusually fast progression for a resident theater company’s original production, and a sign of a show that keeps outgrowing wherever it last played.

The Woman Reduced to a Footnote

The musical’s subject, Gregoria de Jesus, is usually remembered in Philippine history classes as Andres Bonifacio’s wife and the Katipunan’s designated “Lakambini,” a muse title that, on its own, flattens her into decoration. Playwright Nicanor Tiongson, named National Artist for Literature in September 2026, wrote the book with Eljay Castro Deldoc and built the show to argue the opposite. In his view, keeping a revolutionary household running while the men fought, raising a family included, was its own form of heroism. “It’s a heroism that I think many women are not recognized for,” he has said.

The show makes that argument through P-pop rather than traditional musical-theater balladry, a first for Tanghalang Pilipino. Composers Nica del Rosario, the hitmaker behind “Rosas,” “Tala,” and “Karera,” and Matthew Chang built a girl-group sound around the ensemble, directed and co-choreographed by Delphine Buencamino alongside Jan Matthew Almodovar.

Ten Scenes, Built From Her Own Words

The show’s structure comes directly from Gregoria’s own writings, her “Mga Aral” (Lessons), broken into ten scenes rather than a conventional biopic arc. Marynor Madamesila leads as Gregoria, with an ensemble of Sarah Monay, Heart Puyong, Anya Evangelista, Ynna Rafa, Sofia Sacaguing, and Murline Uddin doing double duty as a commenting chorus and as other historical figures, including Bonifacio himself. One invented scene stages a confrontation between Gregoria and Emilio Aguinaldo, a meeting with no historical record, built to dramatize the still-unresolved anger over Bonifacio’s execution on Aguinaldo’s order without presenting it as documented fact.

What This Run Means for TP40

Tanghalang Pilipino’s 40th season, “Past Forward,” is built around revisiting the company’s own history while pushing its work into new forms. “Gregoria Lakambini” is both: the company’s first P-pop musical, and already proven enough to justify a third mounting inside its own anniversary season, which runs through May 2027. Season passes are available at bit.ly/TP40SeasonPass, with single-show tickets through Tanghalang Pilipino’s official channels.