24/07/2025
In a country where arts funding is thin and audience attention thinner, the story of Little Boy Productions reads like a curious kind of folk tale—equal parts chutzpah, hustle, and heart. Founded in 2001 by Cebuano cultural instigator Hendri Go, the company’s first show was a modest staging of A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters, with Bart Guingona and Pinky Amador reading to each other from opposite sides of the stage in a borrowed venue. Not exactly Hamilton, but enough to light a slow-burning fire.
Since then, Little Boy has brought Broadway musicals, devised Filipino works, drag, improv, and spoken word to the Cebuanos, often with no blueprint beyond instinct. Once on This Island came next, casting a then-unknown college student named Raki Vega as Ti Moune and giving local actors a rare shot at full-scale musical theater. A decade later, they staged Pragres, a wild, genre-defying adaptation of a short story by F. Sionil Jose, who flew to Cebu for the premiere and declared himself delighted.
The name “Little Boy” isn’t just self-effacing branding. “My energy is like that of a little boy,” Go once said in an interview, “makulit and with wide-eyed wonder.” It’s a metaphor that has stuck, mostly because it’s true. He’s spent the past two decades bouncing from genre to genre and medium to medium, staging concerts with Lea Salonga, bringing improv troupe SPIT to Cebu, organizing literary festivals and spoken word shows, and even hosting auditions for Hong Kong Disneyland. If there’s a line between high and low art, Go doesn’t see it.
Now, Little Boy is back with Almost, Maine, a bittersweet snow-globe of a play by John Cariani—part rom-com, part fable, part therapy. Directed by the Seattle-based Rhea Bautista and featuring 16 Cebuano actors (some homegrown, some returning from abroad), the production is a one-night test run, with an eye toward a bigger future. “If you build it, they will come,” Go says, quoting Kevin Costner with a smile that reads more weary than wistful.
In a cultural landscape where most theater remains university-based or semi-professional, Go insists on a distinction. His shows, however lean, are built with craft. “It’s not a funding issue,” he says. “It’s how big your ambition is.” But ambition has its limits, especially when ticket prices can’t reflect actual production costs, and when, as Go jokes, “Cebuanos are kuripot—including me.”
Still, there is something stubbornly radiant about Little Boy’s work: the way it insists on connection, on risk, on showing up. Over the years, the company has become a training ground for countless artists, many of whom have gone on to national or international careers. And even as Go dreams up his next Manila musical, his roots remain tangled in the city where it all started.
As he looks to the company’s 25th anniversary next year, Go is still guided by that restless, preposterous energy. Not quite Peter Pan, not quite impresario, he continues to chase stories and stages with the tenacity of someone who believes, maybe foolishly, that a play can change a city. Or at least make it dream.
