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MANILA, Philippines – There is a tendency, especially with queer work, to speak only of what it resists. Dalaga na si Maxie Oliveros certainly resists — the usual tropes, the neat tragedies, the fetish for quiet queer suffering. But what moved me most was what this drag-theater hybrid dared to stand for, especially with a debutante Maxie at the helm.
A long way to Maxie Oh
I have always loved Maxie Oliveros for how un-exportable he is. He is not the sanitized queer protagonist some Western audiences expect — think the tragic but tasteful, bruised but quiet. Maxie is foul-mouthed and flirty, unafraid to make a scene, and unbothered by your discomfort. He struts through the slums of Manila with a flighty hip and a sharp tongue, his queerness neither explained, nor belittled, nor softened.
The film never flinches from her bakla-ness, never corrects it into something more palatable. He was adored by his macho family and he adored a rookie cop without fear.
For a long time, she lived in my memory like that: barefoot, bony, beloved. Draped in the heat of postcolonial Manila, lit from within by that particular kind of sweetness only the defiant can possess.
So when I sat in the theater for Dalaga na si Maxie Oliveros, my first brush with a stage adaptation for the film, I braced myself. It had been months since I had last seen him onscreen, even, having skipped my biannual rewatch of the movie.
In my mind, he had stayed twelve forever, golden and invulnerable in his youth. But the Maxie onstage, played by the stunning Jamila Rivera, was older, unfrozen in the alley of adolescence. Her shoulders had lifted, back had broadened, feet had slipped themselves in flats that’d no doubt get you kicked off RuPaul’s Drag Race. She wore a girl’s school uniform now. Her voice trembled when confetti popped. She had learned, it seemed, to stumble and flinch, but this didn’t make her some ghoulish mutation of the Maxie in my memories.
The musical doesn’t erase the film. It doesn’t try to overwrite Maxie’s first becoming. Instead, it builds on it — layer by layer, breath by breath, until the version of her that emerges is not so much a reinvention as a continuation. Older. Wearier. More fearful, but still ridiculous and radiant.
We often talk about coming-of-age as if it’s something that ends. But Dalaga na si Maxie Oliveros, and all of Maxie’s different stages of blossoming, remind us that girlhood — especially queer girlhood, especially femme-of-center brown queer girlhood — is never quite as beautiful as a debut makes it seem.
But this Maxie, all grown and growing still, wants that beauty anyway.
Palaban, paandar, pasabog!
What’s dazzling about Dalaga na si Maxie Oliveros is that it refuses queer tragedy without flattening queerness into some euphoric, hysterical celebration. It doesn’t deny solemnity; it metabolizes it. The musical lets grief linger like glitter in the wings — visible, hard to scrub off — even as the stage throbs with sequins and sound.
Pageantry is not a distraction here. It is the medium through which hurt is sublimated into survival, where history takes on shape and shimmer. The musical locates its stakes not in abstract tragedy, but in the material losses queer people in Manila faced in 2018: the threat of state violence, the precarity of chosen family, the ache of being public and femme and poor.
The cast of ‘Dalaga na si Maxie Oliveros’Still, joy becomes choreography. Gasping, stomping, lipsyncing like it’s prayer. Bodies catching each other mid-fall, tightening corsets backstage, rehearsing gestures of power until they become muscle memory. The theater knows what the state will not name: that drag, for many, is not escape but architecture. Not fantasy but livelihood. The house Maxie finds herself in, a far cry from her old manor of men, has floorboards, rules, grudges, schedules, and a deeply gendered, queered discipline of care.
Drag here is not metaphor. It is serious. It is structural. It is the thing that survives you when everything else falls through. There’s no need to mythologize drag as radical just for existing. The musical doesn’t. It shows the work. The slow, exhausting ways this form of life makes itself livable. Wigs are borrowed, lashes are reused, dreams of boob jobs and hormones are adjusted to the size of your nightly tips.
And Maxie — still learning, still too soft, still easily startled — becomes the beneficiary of this system. She is not simply the darling baby of her newfound drag family, not the precious effeminate child alone in doing housework. She is part of a longer history of girls whose femininity was once punished and is now praised. Part of a lineage of queens who were not born women, but who labored toward womanhood as something constructed, contested, cherished.
The musical doesn’t ask her to be brave alone. It hands her the tools. The heels. The number. The backup vocals. Each pasabog is less a climax than a transfer of memory, a reminder that someone else survived this long enough to teach you how.
The joys that drag us forward
Maxie doesn’t return to us in this musical as a ghost, or a martyr, or a lesson. She reappears the way most queer people do — at a party, in good lighting, with too much blush. And from the moment the floral chandelier casts haloes on the queens and her drag family begins to sing, we’re given a blueprint for joy that isn’t abstract or imagined. It is logistical. It is emotional. It is practiced.
Theater has always been a shelter for the fugitive self. But in Dalaga na si Maxie Oliveros, with all the glamor the drag extravaganza brings, it also becomes a kind of collective memory, one with textured nails and cheap contour.
That stage, a dressing room, pageant stage, and prison all at once is not a metaphor for transformation; it is the transformation. It’s where dreams are stapled together with borrowed lace. It’s where bills are split, where pain is powdered down, where someone cries over a lost lover while someone else fixes a busted heel.
The musical resists the idea that queer joy must be earned through biblical suffering. Here, joy is not escapism. It’s the work itself. Drag doesn’t hide the struggle; it redistributes it with the community. When Maxie and her sisters pass the mic, pass the makeup, pass the tip jar, they’re also passing along a method for survival that doesn’t require becoming invulnerable. Just held.
In the original film, Maxie’s queerness radiated in solitude. It glowed through the sweat and heat of city streets, tender but terribly alone. But in this musical, she is not alone anymore. Her debut is less a personal milestone than a ritual of transfiguration, her entrance not just earned but subsidized by every woman before her who (n)ever got to walk the same runway.
What the musical insists on is not merely the endurance of queer life, but its pleasure. Its mess. Its heat. The backroom chaos, the lipstick on teeth, the wig caps hung up to dry. The parts that don’t make it into the parade. The quiet, stupid, gorgeous joy of staying. And community. And staying.
And when I watched Maxie — older now, wiser, no longer untouched by violence but still alive with want — I felt blessed that she was allowed to grow older. That the world of the story bent enough to hold her full becoming. That the light followed her not to a grave, but to a stage. I thought of how rare that is, for someone like her to be seen as worth anything past prepubescence. To be permitted a future that isn’t conditional on goodness, or silence, or palatability.
She had not been punished into martyrdom. She had not been diluted for clarity. Instead, she flinched and flailed and found her footing even with a cut-up wig, backed by a chorus of queens who had long known how to lift their own.
Maxie is neither lesson nor moral. She is not the softened end of a hard-fought metaphor. She is, simply, still here — full of fear, full of flair, and full of the kind of joy that has outlasted every elegy they wrote for girls like her. She walked out in ruffles and ran back in tears. She cracked jokes even while trembling. She chose softness where she could. And maybe, in some corner of that mirror-ball glow, she taught me something I hadn’t realized I’d forgotten: that queerness can age. That we can make it through, not just in theory, not just in symbol, but in breath and sweat and shaky song.
Congrats, Maxie. Ang ganda mong dalaga. – Rappler.com
Angela Divina is a Rappler intern studying Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the Ateneo de Manila University.
