Ambon, Ulan, Baha Returns to The MET After Three Decades

Theater

Sep 7

Nearly fifty years after it first warned of a nation’s reckoning with nature, the landmark Filipino zarzuela returns to the stage where its earlier chapter closed, carrying a message that has only grown heavier with time.

Words Gerie Marie Consolacion
Photos courtesy of The Metropolitan Theater
September 7, 2026

There is a peculiar kind of déjà vu in watching a play about a flood return to a theater that once shut its doors after that very play was staged.

In 1992, Ambon, Ulan, Baha was the last production to grace the Metropolitan Theater before the historic venue fell silent for years. This September 26 and 27, it comes back to the same hallowed stage, and the timing feels less like coincidence than reckoning.

The musical, an ethno-pop-rock modern zarzuela written by multi-awarded playwright Frank G. Rivera, tells the story of Nonoy and Inday, two young lovers in the fictional Barrio Magubat whose future is quietly mortgaged the moment a logging concession moves into their community.

Behind that concession stand Don Calixto and his son Doctor Anton, men whose ambitions dress themselves up as progress. As the trees fall and old traditions fade with them, the story builds toward an inevitable and devastating flood, one that does not discriminate between the guilty and the innocent.

What makes the piece extraordinary is not that it predicted disaster. It is that it did so decades before the phrase climate change entered everyday conversation.

First conceived as Kaingin in 1976, part of a trilogy called Ang Hawla created and performed by MSU Sining Kambayoka, the work was expanded into the full length zarzuela audiences know today in 1978.

Its score grew out of the ensemble’s collaborative spirit, with Rivera composing much of the music, including the haunting Ambon, Ulan, Baha theme, alongside contributions from fellow original artists such as Emilio Boy Nicolasin Jr. and the late Philip James Tremedal.

History, unfortunately, kept proving the play right. The Ormoc flash floods of 1991 arrived not long after its earlier stagings, and in the years since, the Philippines has endured a grim procession of typhoons, landslides, and floods that echo the same warning almost line for line.

Nearly fifty years on, the musical has not aged into irrelevance. If anything, it reads now as prophecy fulfilled rather than fiction imagined.

This 2026 restaging is also deeply personal to its origins. It marks part of the 52nd anniversary celebrations of Sining Kambayoka, the pioneering theater company Rivera founded at Mindanao State University in 1974, an institution regarded as one of the country’s most significant cultural treasures for its Kambayoka Theater Form, a tradition that weaves Meranaw chants, folklore, music, and dance into something distinctly and unmistakably Filipino.

That lineage carries through into this production with the participation of Manlilikha ng Bayan Rosie Godwino Sula, a National Living Treasure honored for her mastery of T’boli epic chanting, whose presence roots the piece even further in the cultural memory it draws from.

The new staging, presented by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and the Metropolitan Theater and produced by Pixel Art Media Production Co., does not simply revive the original.

Under the direction of CJ Andaluz, with Rivera returning as playwright and principal composer and Pipo Cifra handling the 2026 musical arrangement, the production leans on modern stage technology to turn the MET itself into a living, breathing world of rain and ruin.

Audiences can expect immersive projections, aerial sequences, and even rainfall within the historic theater, choices meant to make the coming catastrophe feel less like spectacle and more like memory.

Leading the cast are CJ Navato as Nonoy and Thea Astley as Inday, joined by Anton Juan as Don Calixto and Rendell Sanchez as Doctor Anton. They are supported by a company built from both familiar faces and new blood, including Nazer Salcedo, Onyl Torres, Shermaine Santiago, and Sweet Buchanan, alongside a Taumbayan ensemble that brings together alumni of earlier productions with a new generation of performers, and a Koro drawn from Tanghalang Bagong Sibol.

For Andaluz, the play’s endurance lies precisely in its refusal to let audiences off the hook. He said that what once read as a cautionary tale now describes lived reality, that Filipinos no longer stand at the water’s edge but are already immersed in floods both literal and figurative that continue to upend communities and livelihoods.

The point the musical makes, gently but insistently, is that environmental destruction rarely springs from malice. It tends to come dressed as progress, as opportunity, as the promise of a better life, until the cost of that promise becomes impossible to ignore.

That is ultimately the question Ambon, Ulan, Baha leaves hanging over its audience long after the lights come up.

How many more floods, landslides, and disasters will it take before the country recognizes how fragile the balance between people and nature really is?

Nearly five decades after it first asked that question in a small stage adaptation in Mindanao, the musical returns to Manila still waiting for an answer, and still hoping audiences will finally choose to listen.

Ambon, Ulan, Baha runs on September 26 and 27 at the Metropolitan Theater, with tickets available through Ticketnation.ph.