Nasaan Si Hesus? Goes From The Stage To The Big Screen

The musical, "Nasaan si Hesus?, was staged 20 years ago under the helm of Nestor Torre, with music and lyrics by Lourdes "Bing" Pimentel.

- LEAH C. SALTERIO

The musical, "Nasaan si Hesus?," was staged 20 years ago under the helm of Nestor Torre, with music and lyrics by Lourdes "Bing" Pimentel. After two decades, the musical is now a major motion picture.

The project was offered to stage and film director Dennis Marasigan two years ago. However, it was stalled because of the pandemic.

When Senator Pimentel was still around, his wife, Bing Pimentel, staged a show that featured her compositions at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) in 2018. Direk Dennis worked at the helm of that show.

"After that, Nay Bing told me about her musical, 'Nasaan si Hesus?'," Dennis shared. "She wanted to (turn) that into film and she was looking for a scriptwriter. When I told her that I also write scripts, she started talking to me about it."

"Nasaan si Hesus?" was staged in 1999 and had many iterations through the years. "Nestor was already sick in 2018, so the last production, it was Rito Asilo who directed," informed Dennis.

"We started adapting the script of 'Nasaan si Hesus' but pandemic came and the project was stalled. We seriously revived it in 2023 already. We started post-pandemic and we decided to adapt the story to the present day."

The other themes of "Nasaan si Hesus?" became contemporary and episodic, with review as its structure. The stories were about the street children, minorities, workers.

"The challenge was how to adapt the musical into film, so we would have a structure that's for film," Dennis granted. "We had many revisions as we were working until finally, we finalized a script that was acceptable to Nay Bing.