“I have been overusing the word ‘cluttered,’” Jon Santos tells me over Zoom, when asked about what keeps him occupied these days.
When we spoke last June, the consummate performer had just opened the rerun of his one-man show, Bawat Bonggang Bagay, a local adaptation of Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe’s Every Brilliant Thing, following sold-out runs in the past two years. At the same time, he was well into preparation for the staging of Bill Russell and Henry Krieger’s Side Show: The Musical, which fictionalizes the lives of vaudeville artists Daisy and Violet Hilton. The musical is set to run from July 26 through Aug. 16 at the Power Mac Center Spotlight Black Box Theater in Circuit Makati, where Bawat Bonggang Bagay also made its final bow on June 22.
“And I have family obligations in the south for my mom and here in the north for my husband, who is recovering very, very well from the medical puzzles that we needed to solve throughout 2023 and 2024,” Santos continues. “But it’s kind of good cluttered. When you’re good cluttered, there’s really no space for anxiety or stress. Or doubt or overthinking.”
Since completing his economics degree at the University of the Philippines a lifetime ago, Santos has done it all: movies, television, theater, standup comedy. Ask him to play a political figure or a plant, and he will knock it out of the park either way. Master impersonator is a title four decades in the making. Some might even argue that you’re a nobody until Santos impersonates you.
Right now, the pop culture multi-hyphenate remains a regular judge in Drag Race Philippines, the local franchise of the global hit show, whose latest offering is the all-stars spinoff, Slaysian Royale, where Filipino drag queens are set to diva-off with other Asian queens from different franchises.
Throughout his storied career, Santos also faced controversies and wrestled with sobriety. Through it all, Tessie Tomas, who became his longtime friend and mentor, was there. Tomas was also the reason why Santos didn’t give up comedy. “Sabi niya, give it a year. Best advice.”
The actor’s first stage experience dates back to a grade school production of The Little Prince in 1974, when he was studying at Marist School Marikina, an all-boys learning institution. “Chameleon na ako maliit pa lang,” he reveals. “I went through the class clown stage. In elementary, I knew how to impersonate every teacher.” He saw power in that. “And they clap and they get it and say, ‘Yeah, ganyan nga siya.’ That is the power.” His knack for performing carried on in high school and college, until he was introduced to standup comedy and later shaped by Tomas and Willie Nepomuceno.
'If it's true, it will always be new'
Santos says that his latest and fourth turn in Bawat Bonggang Bagay is more of an “athletic performance” due to the change in his acting space. “I am pulled up a little bit more,” he explains. “I’m running a little bit more. There (are) manghihilot obligations after the show. May 30-minute leg massage kay manong.”
He admits that the physicality of the show gets to him as he’s now barely in his quinquagenarian years. “I embrace all of that,” he says. The one-act play, which tells the story of a nameless narrator who recounts his mother’s battle with depression as he battles his own, still feels new and has become more personal to Santos, following the respiratory problems his own mother deals with and the two heart surgeries his now cancer-free husband, the businessman West Stewart, went through. “If it is true and it is you, it will always be new. So (with) the new me who’s working on the existing text, it somehow comes out to a different outcome pa rin.”
Side Show, where Santos takes on the role of a manipulative ringmaster, is a huge leap for him. “It’s sung through. I probably have less than a hundred spoken words,” says the seasoned performer, who animatedly demonstrates his singing panache mid-conversation. “It’s the first musical I am joining na hindi jukebox musical, where the songs are already existing in the catalog of OPM and American songs. Priscilla was a jukebox, Rak (of Aegis) was jukebox, Bituing Walang Ningning was jukebox, (Ang Huling) El Bimbo (had) Eraserhead songs.”
Sinking his teeth into two successive shows, Santos realizes that things have really slowed down for him. “It will really take a month for me to be physically, emotionally ready,” he elaborates. “And it’s age, and that’s that. You know, a solo show before, ang bilis-bilis. You write in the morning because your show’s at night, and then (you have to include) news about this certain impeachment, this certain election, this certain candidate saying this thing.”
Past this, there’s a shift in his work ethic after three decades of being a soloist, where he finds himself “alone with a microphone standing at the kitchen of a hotel waiting to go on.” “Now there’s serious dancing, there’s serious acting, there’s rehearsal halls, there’s call times, there are production reports,” he says. Santos proceeds to divulge a trade secret about career longevity. “Hang around or work around people who are all smarter than you. Diyan ka gagaling.”
State of comedy
Of all the characters and personalities he’s played and pirated, Vilma Santos, he tells me, is the most magical. “She was the one who always had something to say about anything: motherhood, showbiz, politics,” he says. “She was a daughter. She’s a wife. She’s a politician. She’s a star. She’s a grandmother. She’s an icon. She’s a friend.”
“There’s always material for an Ate V monologue,” Santos adds, before waxing eloquent about the Star for All Seasons’ cultural ubiquity. “She has lived in every genre. There was horror, there was sex, there was drama, there was true story. She has done everything, and she is still everywhere.” What better way to give life to an iconic cultural figure than through a performer just as legendary, an artist who’s been a vessel for a vast range of people in the limelight.
I press him about the state of local comedy and how it has evolved through the decades. Santos says the “big boom” came after the 1986 EDSA Revolution. “We are free to speak. We are free to depict them on a stage without being afraid that, you know, you’ll get a call.” The art form would cycle through many lives, just as regimes shifted, from barely good to worse. Every administration, then, was a comedy of errors.
Given how internet culture hacks through our lives, comedy has learned to adapt to the lingua franca of the chronically online generation. If not in memes, then in the form of vertical content appearing in quick bites on TikTok and Instagram Reels. “I think it’s alive,” Santos observes. “It’s alive in monologues of Baus Rufo, Alex Calleja, Comedy Manila, and SPIT Improv.” The Gen Z audience, he adds, is not hesitant to invest in live entertainment. Drag brunches and watch parties, for instance, are solid proof. “May pera sila.”
Even in Drag Race, impersonation finds new life through its “Snatch Game” segment. “Doon (pa) lang sa Season 1, you have Marina Summers doing an incredible Gloring,” he says, referring to former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. “You have Viñas Deluxe and Precious Paula Nicole. These are not just glamorous wigs and beautiful fictional divas in colorful gowns. They can play Boy Abunda, they can play Kris Aquino, they can play Charo Santos. So, impersonation is alive, but I guess not in the political satire stage all the time.”
Toward the end of our conversation, I ask: what is theater to you now? “I have been more aware of its ability to heal,” Santos says with disarming casualness. He’s only realized that in the last three years as his personal life has trudged through rough waters. If before, he found two hours of comic relief through standup, theater now provides him “long-term healing.”
Santos is far from retiring. In fact, he still dreams of playing in a musical version of Lino Brocka’s Ang Tatay Kong Nanay, or in a local, Bona-esque translation of the West End and Broadway play The Dresser. He is also a self-confessed Virgin Labfest virgin, and it’s something that he’s eyeing to change. “Maybe next year I’ll get to reach out and say, ‘May I audition for an upcoming Virgin Labfest?’ That would be fantastic.”
Despite the shows he stars in, Santos’ life has mostly quieted down. His mornings start with 10 minutes of breath work, then 10 minutes of yoga. Some days he just idles on their family farm in Silang, Cavite. He intends to travel more. “(But) I also have to figure out how much time I could really be away because time na for mom,” he says. Contrary to his role in Bawat Bonggang Bagay, he now plays parent to his mother, which he says he never finds tiring.
“Sobering,” as he aptly puts it. “Kung akala mo ang mundo ay umiikot lamang sa ‘yo, please be reminded na walang sino man ang narito na walang pananagutan sa ibang tao.”
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Story by Lé Baltar
Photos by Elisha Ruiz
Cover design by Andrea Panaligan
Special thanks to The Sandbox Collective