Fifty Years of Young Love and a Homecoming

Theater

Aug 28

Love transcends time and it has been proven after five decades through Dulaang Sibol’s Sinta.

Words Gerie Marie Consolacion
Photos courtesy of Dulaang Sibol
August 28, 2026

Before Netflix, before HBO, before anyone streamed anything, there was Sinta.

For fifty years, one high school theater group has kept it alive, and this August, they're bringing it home one more time.

DULAANG SIBOL presents the 50th anniversary run of Sinta, widely considered the country’s longest-running musical, with performances on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from August 21 to 30 at the Tanghalang Onofre Pagsanghan of Ateneo de Manila High School.

The story begins on August 14, 1976, the night Dulaang Sibol’s own theater first opened its doors and Sinta was staged for the very first time. It has returned almost every year since, a run no other Filipino musical can match.

The book and lyrics come from Onofre Pagsanghan, the legendary Ateneo lecturer and Gawad Buhay Lifetime Achievement awardee whose words have shaped generations of students who passed through his classroom and this stage.

The late National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera once described it as “a story of young love told in verse and song, steeped in nostalgia for simpler times.” That description still holds even after fifty years later, the invitation is the same one it has always been: Alalahanin, gunitain. Limampung taon nati'y sariwain.

The anniversary caps a story that actually stretches back seventy years. What started as the Ateneo High School Dramatics Society in 1955 became Dulaang Sibol sixty years ago, and found its permanent home in the very theater it still performs in today, five decades ago, the same year Sinta was born.

Fittingly, this run brings the alumni home too. Surgeons and aspiring surgeons, lawyers and law students, engineers, designers, professors, photographers, writers, entrepreneurs: people who left this stage for very different lives are stepping back onto it, fumbling theater artists once more.

Directing them is Giancarlo Abrahan, who just won Best Director at this year’s Cinemalaya Film Festival.

In the end, Sinta has become something bigger than a musical. It is a living archive, kept alive by a community that keeps returning to stage it, year after year, for audiences who keep returning to this humble theater to watch it.

Fifty years don't happen twice, come be part of this one by securing your tickets at bit.ly/WatchSinta2026.