How one of the world's first viral videos led to Canada's first all-Filipino musical production

May is Asian Heritage Month, and there's no dearth of lauded, buzzworthy pieces of TV, film and more to mark the occasion. Earlier this year, Everything Everywhere All At Once made Oscar history with its historic wins for Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan for their roles in the story of a Chinese American family. More recently, Lee Sung Jin's Netflix series Beef starring Steven Yeun and Ali Wong has been taking over our timelines. Just last week, Broadway announced its first ever all-Filipino cast for Here Lives Love, a musical about Imelda Marcos with music by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, which is set to open next month.

But before that happens, another all-Filipino musical — Prison Dancer: The Musical — is about to premiere at Edmonton's Citadel Theatre, officially opening May 11 and running until May 28. And just announced today, it will appear as well in the 2023-24 English Theatre season of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa from November 23 to December 2, 2023.

NAC English Theatre artistic director Nina Lee Aquino, who grew up in the Philippines before moving to Canada, is also directing the world premiere of Prison Dancer: The Musical in Edmonton — a full circle moment for herself and the show's co-writers, Romeo Candido and Carmen De Jesus, that exemplifies the journey of Asian creators in Canada to tell meaningful stories reflective of their lives on the country's biggest stages.

Prison Dancer: The Musical is a landmark production in Canada: it's the first Filipino musical produced in the country, and the writers, director, cast and producers all share a Filipino ethnicity. Its content, a dramatization of the performers featured in the mid-2000s viral sensation "The Dancing Inmates of Cebu," is also a chance for Filipino creators to tell a Filipino story.

The original video features 1,500 dancers clad in orange, covering virtually every foot of the concrete floor in a maximum security prison in Cebu Province, Philippines. As Michael Jackson's "Thriller" plays, they perform a four-and-a-half-minute intricate dance to the song, complete with the signature moves and zombie walks. It's been called one of the world's first viral videos — but news coverage of the inmates took a mocking tone. Candido and De Jesus wanted to take a different approach. 

A project like Prison Dancer was only a dream when the pair met as young actors in the Toronto production of Miss Saigon back in 1993 — a musical written by white men often starring actors of any Asian ethnicity to represent the show's Vietnamese characters, or as Candido says, "doing cosplay of other cultures."

"This May, when we open here at the Citadel, is our 30th anniversary of when me and Carmen opened Miss Saigon in Toronto, a musical written by two French people about the Vietnamese experience," says Candido, who also works as a Canadian TV writer and showrunner. "And it's taken us 30 years to come to this place where we now have a Filipino creative team: Filipino cast, Filipino authors, and Filipino producers."

"I feel like we are really at a new era where Asian Canadians or Asian North Americans are really the architects and creators of our stories now."

Candido and Aquino also have a long history. As the founding artistic director of the fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company, Aquino was a leader in stewarding Asian artists to the forefront of Toronto theatre, including the foundational Banana Boys in 2008, for which Candido did original compositions and sound design. Around the same time, the first iterations of Prison Dancer began to form, first conceived and workshopped as a musical which was transformed into an award-winning, interactive web series in 2012, full of pop music, drag, prison fights and an influencer host. Now — yet another full circle moment — it's premiering as a fully realized stage musical.

"Romeo and I have worked on other Filipino-Canadian plays, but they've all been small-scale," says Aquino. "This one is the biggest one we've tackled. There's the choreography aspect; there's the music aspect. It's all hands on deck with this one."

"To work on this scale, at this point of our career, with all of this experience under our belt, leading this cast of some emerging and some established Filipino performers and all Filipino creative teams — it feels not only full circle, but it really feels like a leveling up for what we've been doing over the last 20 years," says Candido.

Aquino adds, "We've been hustling, and we have been telling amazing stories since the beginning of time. I just think that the standards, the norms, the default, which has always been whiteness, is now turning."

Not every creative team would desire a development period of over 15 years — especially when that amount of time is required for the culture at large to catch up to the story they want to tell — but in the case of Prison Dancer: The Musical, the attitude and purpose of the show has deepened as Candido and De Jesus got closer to their subject matter in that time. In fact, when they first viewed the famous "Dancing Inmates of Cebu" video, they felt immediately attracted to the sensation of being seen on such a massive scale. 

"To actually see Filipinos be popular outside of the Filipino community was one of the things that struck me first," says Candido. "As a Filipino storyteller at the time when Nina and I were coming up in Toronto, we were always having to explain something. So, when this thing was famous, finally we had the notion that you don't have to explain what Filipino is because people globally knew about it."

But after that excitement wore off, a more unsettling reaction to the viral video crept in. "I remember seeing morning shows and different news outlets playing the video and going, 'Those crazy Filipinos!' In the beginning days, there was a feeling of, 'We don't like people laughing at our community. We want to give more context.' And that just deepened over the last ten years."

De Jesus and Candido say early iterations of Prison Dancer leaned far more into the campy and tropey side of the story, as seen in the 2012 web series which was nominated for Best Original Program or Series, Fiction at the first Canadian Screen Awards in 2013. But the tone began to shift as the two dived into research for the play, including making a trip to the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center itself, revealing the complex and often dark reality of the prison system in the Philippines, the story behind the original videos, and the changing state of violence under former president Rodrigo Duterte.

"We really wanted to create an alternative origin story to the dancing, which wasn't something that was born from the inmates themselves. But [in our play], it's a way to find release, a way to build community, and a way to also detox from the drug use that is rampant within these prisons," says De Jesus. "The story that we have is one where all of the dancing, all of the phenomenon, came from within the cell blocks and the prisoners themselves."

"We're uplifting how resilient Filipinos are through singing and through dancing, which is something that is 100% part of our culture in the Philippines and all throughout the diaspora. That's a big part of this reboot."

The result is a far cry from the surface-level virality of the original video, or the way mainstream white culture received it. What remains is a serious look at the state of drug use in the country and those who might find themselves persecuted for it.

"Drug users were painted as a disease to the country," says Candido. "When the extrajudicial killing started happening, people would just die — would be murdered in the street, no judge, no jury, no due diligence."

"We were rewriting during this time. After having met inmates, we knew they were just human people and more than their mistakes. We just wanted to make sure that in our own little musical theatre way, we can bring humanity back to these people."

De Jesus adds, "We wanted to say, 'This is not something just to laugh at. This is meaningful for us, for all of us. And here's why.'"

Prison Dancer runs at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton to May 28, followed by a run at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa November 23 to December 2.