Peta’s “Skin-Deep” and Tanghalang Pilipino’s “EJ: Ang Pinagdaanang Buhay nina Evelio Javier at Edgar Jopson,” which ran almost simultaneously (the former at Peta Theater Center, the latter at CCP’s Little Theater), were musicals that played out like two halves of the same coin.

But with a difference. They were inverse images of each other, one’s strengths proving to be the other’s weakness, and so forth. They weren’t bad plays—only that their parts were markedly better than the whole, the sprawling canvas proving to be less interesting than the detailed studies.

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