Background
Jose Carvajal was born as Jose Maganti y Arate on August 27, 1862, in Manila, Philippines. He was the son of Jose Maria Garcia and Josefa Arate.
Jose Carvajal was born as Jose Maganti y Arate on August 27, 1862, in Manila, Philippines. He was the son of Jose Maria Garcia and Josefa Arate.
Jose Carvajal began his studies in the Escuela Normal. Later he was brought to Cebu where he continued his schooling in the seminary conducted by the Congregacion de San Vicente de Paul.
After his schooling, Jose Carvajal's father put him on the sea, probably in the same vessel with him. In 1876 while his boat was at anchor in Manila bay, he saw native young performers stage in Teatro Jaboneros in Binondo, among whom were Nemesio Ratia and Tomas Earnshaw, and the girls, Simeona Navoa and Candelaria Punsalan. In the same year, he determined to join this group and he made his debut appearing as Brigida, a female role, in Juan Tenorio, which was shown in a carrillo show. With these upstarts, he worked in these shadowgraphs for several months performing varied mimicking roles. Not a long time afterward came the Gregory company which contracted him to play acrobatic parts with the rope-dancer Touset. When the Japanese company Torakichi gave performances in Manila, he substituted a certain Gautier as a clown for eight months. Thus by fitting himself rather ubiquitously in odds and ends, he was ushered unto the stage.
Meanwhile, a group composed of Praxedes Fernandez, Rosa Garcia, Martina Ocampo, S. Navoa, and N. Ratia, were undergoing training with Don Juan Barbero, the much-traveled actor who arrived in Manilla in 1875. This group Carvajal joined. It presented the plays La Gallina Ciega, El Pleito, Casado y Soltero. From Barbero, Carvajal learned comic art. It is not known how long he apprenticed himself with this artist, nor the chronology clear. But sometime in 1882, he joined the management of Don Ramon Mulet who must have been a friend of his father. Mulet directed performances at Teatro Filipino, a small showhouse erected in 1881, and at Teatro Cervantes. Under him, Carvajal worked for a couple of years.
Earlier, in 1880 two Spanish artists arrived in Manila from the Peninsula, Don Alejandro Cubero, then retired of the stage and already old, brought with him Elisea Raguer, who though in her early forties was still tender and beautiful. Cubero at first joined the customs service of Manila as a third-class clerk for a living but soon found out that clerking did not suit his temperament. Then he was gathering local talents and with Raguer as the leading artist, he formed the Compania de Zarzuela Cubero. The local stage received a decidedly new impetus. These two artists soon began to train a group of Filipino performers. Cubero found in Carvajal the material wherewith to mould the more gracious inspirations of comic art, and as a good teacher that he was, he cultivated that talent which was in an embryonic stage, picking up his more brilliant qualities and developing him into one of the best artists that ever trod the local stage in that period. In old age, Carvajal later acknowledged his indebtedness to this Spanish director.
Such was the artistic and financial triumph that this enterprise gained that for seven years Carvajal supported it playing leading roles in Spanish plays beginning first with Musica Clasica and later in Una Vieja, La Calandria, Torear por lo Fino, Ya Somos Tres, El Hombre Es Debil, La Tela de Arana and others which were for Carvajal a chain of artistic triumphs. This was mainly due to the good sense of Cubero who learned from an earlier experience the type of play the Manila audience wanted. After presenting Francisco de P. Entrala’s Cuadros Filipinos, which was a parody of the Tagalog Moro-moro drama in Tondo Theater in which Carvajal played the leading role, Cubero from then on refrained from hurting the sentiment of a sensitive public. Cubero brought the troupe to Hong Kong in 1884 with Carvajal and Suzara as principal artists. Upon its return in the early part of 1885, the company again gave performances in the Teatro Filipino.
Upon the death of Cubero in 1888, it seemed that for a time the local stage received a staggering blow. It was an occasion for him to form his own troupe with Ignacio Morales as director of the orchestra. This was a makeshift arrangement, however, for when Raguer arrived from Hongkong on a seasonal engagement, on September 25, 1888, his troupe was fused with that of Raguer, or he acted in the plays presented by Navarro, as in the two-act play Cadiz by Javier de Burgos, where he acted a minor role but always won the applause of his audience and in El Panuelo de Yerbas in two acts arranged from a French work shown in the Teatro Filipino where an observer remarked that Carvajal and Mrs. Rufina de la Red, soprano, were taking the public by storm in every performance. So in 1889, Carvajal worked as co-director in the Compania formed by Navarro de Peralta who had just arrived from the Peninsula and had started to stage some modern plays as La Gran Via.
When the Compania Navarro de Peralta left the Islands in 1890, Carvajal joined his bosom friend Ratia who then had formed his own troupe called Compania Ratia where he became for a season or two the director of the girl's group. This troupe was responsible for presenting zarzuelas and such pieces as La Mascota, Bocaccio, Cadiz, and others. Then he left for the south appearing first in Iloilo and making dramatic engagements as far as Cebu, Zamboanga, and Jolo. Once back in Manila he arranged and directed the presentation of the zarzuela Boccaccio in the latter part of 1892 under the Fernandez troupe, himself performing the difficult role of Lambertino. This was staged in Teatro del Principe, and although this performance was much applauded in the theater and in the local press, one critic considered the first showing disastrous.
In 1894 appeared that he formed his own company, the Compania de Zarzuela Carvajal, with Tagaroma as the principal lady. The company made performances in Naga and other parts of the Bikol region. In Manila, it staged in October 1894 such play as Cadiz in Teatro Zorilla, the two acting principal roles, with the drop curtains painted by Toribio Antillon. About the same period, he also founded a theater of bamboo and nipa in Palomar district called the Teatro Colon, where he produced plays the proceeds of which went to the support of the propaganda movement in Spain, the collections being turned over to Juan Zulueta. He made provincial tours joining one or another company, for it appears that his company did not have stability. In Iloilo, he was caught by the American blockade, and after succeeding in returning to Manila, he joined the revolutionary camp in the latter part of 1898 after the fall of Manila. During the Filipino-American War, he served for a while in the commissary of war, from Caloocan to Dagupan, following the seat of government from town to town and staging performances whenever there was the occasion.
After surrendering to the American authorities about the end of 1899, he joined a Spanish troupe performing at Teatro Filipino. The following year, the dramatic management of Teatro Libertad was placed in his hands, with the Compania Ratia then performing. This company was then composed of Suzara, Tagaroma, Navoa, Maxima Gonzalez, Lamadrid, Sedano, Molinero and Panades and after its engagements in Manila for the season 1901-1902, sailed for Cebu where it staged in Teatro Junquera. During this period, the Tagalog drama was making a new turn, and a number of plays with political tinge were making their appearance on the stage.
Returning to Manila, Carvajal found himself acting in a principal role in Ayer, Hoy y Manana by Aurelio Tolentino but this play was soon banned from the stage by the police and he was implicated. On February 8, 1904, saw the first performance of his three-act zarzuela in Spanish, Ligaya!, with music by Jose A. Estella, in Teatro Zorrilla by the Compania Hispano-Tagalog, which showing received a warm public reception. Meanwhile, he was convicted together with Tolentino, but after serving one-half of the term of seven months imprisonment, he was pardoned. His other zarzuela, Arayat, in three acts, was never staged. Obtaining his freedom, he again joined the Fernandez-Pastor troupe which gave performances in Teatro Cervantes and later in Cine Filipino, Teatro Paz, and in other theaters of the city. His theatrical experience by now was so wide and varied that at one time in 1911 when Ricardo Pastor ventured to present a Spanish company on the local stage, he saved the impresario from certain embarrassment when the principal actor in La Viuda Alegre suddenly became indisposed by taking the role with just one rehearsal. His age becoming a physical obstacle to his appearance on the stage in later years, he kept himself busy doing odds and ends for the artists, for instance, making their wigs.
Jose Carvajal was married twice. First marriage with Ubalda Rochel produced three children. By his second wife, Patrocinio Tagaroma, he had six children.
Jose Maria Garcia was a circus boy in early youth, later becoming a sailor, then a captain of a sailboat, a pilot in Manila, and a member of the marine examining board.
Patrocinio Tagaroma was a Filipino actress in Spanish plays. She was also known as a leading soprano at Compañia de Zarzuela Carvajal.
