34. Welcome to the CABARET ... Pinoy Style

The cabaret started in France, it initially referred to any business serving liquor. However, the history of cabaret culture began in 1881 with the opening of Le Chat Noir in Paris. It was an informal saloon where poets, artists and composers could share ideas and compositions.

Our national hero was no stranger to this place.  Rizal said that he had spent two pesetas and 90 centimos for a baile at the El Excelsior, a cabaret in Madrid.    

LERMA CABARET, Manila's leading social center. The most famous place of its kind in the Orient.

The cabaret was introduced by the American as a form of entertainment for their citizens and soldiers and also to influential Filipinos.  It featured comedy, song, and dance in a restaurant or nightclub with a stage for performances and the audience sitting at tables often dining or drinking, watching the performance, or dancing. Famous cabaret like Santa Ana Cabaret and Lerma Cabaret in Manila were very popular among the socialites.

STA. ANA CABARET advertisement card. Considered as the World's Largest Cabaret in the 20s. John Canson was the Proprietor. It was located on H. Santos Street opposite the Manila Racing Club. It was totally destroyed by typhoon "Yoling" in November of 1970. 

STA. ANA CABARET advertisement card.   

Reverse of card

After the war the cabaret scene changed into a Mediterranean-style brothel - a bar with tables and women who mingle with and entertain the clientele. Traditionally these establishments can also feature some form of stage entertainment, often singers and dancers.

LUZON CABARET, Makati Advertisement Card

MAYPAJO CABARET, Caloocan Advertisement Card

Some cabaret is Manila sell tickets to male patrons; one must have a ticket in order to dance with a lady partner.  Normally one ticket is good for a single dance per song.  If one does not want to change partner he has to buy many tickets.

Souvenir Fob of PASCUAS CABARET, Las Pinas, Rizal, P.I.
JOSE L RAMOS  General Merchant

Various Cabaret Tickets. Circa 1930s

 

Cartoon featuring cabaret comedies

Several reasons why we stay in the Philippine. A scene inside the cabaret.

NEW PIT'S BAR in Tejeros, Makati. Managed by Pedro Hizon

Post WWII advertisement flyer for American GIs. B-29 INN in Pasig. Managed by Amador Pahati

STA. ANA CABARET, WHERE MANILA'S RICH AND FAMOUS PARTIED 'TIL THEY DROPPED

Roberto Villarcabral

Originally published on Esquire Philippines,  June 2020

 

▪︎ A MAN WITH THE PLAN ▪︎

The story of Santa Ana Cabaret would not begin without the story of its proprietor. Giovanni Canzana entered this world a nobody. He was born in 1878 in the municipality of San Polo Matese, Italy, to working-class parents. An intelligent man who followed the beat of his own drum, Canzana was quite the maverick that he plotted a voyage to the United States with one particular goal in mind - to get rich.

He arrived in Ellis Island by 1903 and found work in the West Virginia mines. This was where Canzana's initial American episode ends, because the following year, the restless Italian found himself in the Philippine Islands, re-locating in Pangasinan and marrying a local named Hilaria Sikat. They had a tough marriage but had to wait 18 years to be granted a divorce.

In the midst of that, Canzana had become a naturalised American citizen and became known to every one as the much more anglicised John Canson. His determination to distance himself from his impoverished past transformed him into an entrepreneur with an astute business acumen. He divided his time between ventures in both the Philippines and the United States.

Among his earliest endeavors in the Philippines was in 1909, with a bar in Pasig, which turned up a healthy profit. The success encouraged him to roll the dice further. He took on a lease for a sprawling property at a nondescript backroad of Tejeros, then a small barrio of rural Makati. On that property was a small watering hole made of nipa and thatch. Modest, but it pooled in a good number of customers from the American military. That watering hole in question was Santa Ana Cabaret.

Named for its border toward Manila's Santa Ana district, this "cabaret" was no-where near the theatrical cabarets popularised in France. It was more or less akin to a social club where people can drink, unwind, and dance.

Canson took advantage of its proximity to Manila and sought to make it the place for the American community. In 1918 - four years into his proprietorship - Canson consulted the Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific Company in the renovation of the Cabaret. It took three years to transform the humble hut into the grand centre of entertainment from his visions. In 1921, that vision became a reality.

Little did he know that he was about to establish for himself a place in the annals of Philippine history.

▪︎ THE DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES ▪︎

By the 1930s, the Cabaret - at two hundred and seventy metres wide - was renowned as being the largest dance hall in all of the world. Its edifice, which stretched from width to length, was built with ninety-per-cent wood and ornamented with the finest chandeliers from Europe.

Canson spared no expense in making sure the Cabaret was well attended; beautifying the interiors and even hiring the best cooks and the best hostesses. His daring paid off, as the best of everything attracted the best of people. Soon it wasn't just the personnel of Fort McKinley who was there for a tropical respite; but dignitaries, as well.

Certainly, the Cabaret may have been on the narrow road of Santos Street; but because it was advertised as a place of class and comfort, such a minor hindrance did not stop the clientele from growing. Its premises, a stone's throw away from the race track, were conveniently adjacent to a street-car junction; coach men would wait on the street corner in their small horse-drawn carriages to drive visitors to their destination, the hottest night spot of Manila.

The Cabaret was two clubs in one separated by a white picket fence: One side was where the military guys and lonely hearts can spend time with "the girls," for one peso a jitter; while the other side was a place where prominent figures can rub elbows with each other, with tables lined in white linen and the most premium alcohol available in their hands.

All in all, the Cabaret was a popular place to dance to live swing music as much as it was a place to dine, boasting of its famous spaghetti dinners - perhaps the one link left hinting toward the Italian heritage of its proprietor; one who liked to fashion himself as a man of mystery.

Canson and the Cabaret gained great commendations that a contemporary publication raved, "He never watered his spirits, his girls don't try to entice customers, and no body has ever been thrown out of the club."

What Studio 54 was to '70s New York, Santa Ana Cabaret was to '30s Manila. Both prided in exclusivity. At the time, the Cabaret had an Americans-only policy; restricting the average Filipino to wait by the taxi rings. A few exceptions had been made for the Filipino of influence: tycoons, artists, intellectuals, and politicians.

President Quezon was a frequent patron; not to mention friends with Canson. On a few nights, he would bring over General MacArthur, who in turn became a regular himself. Through Quezon, by extension, it also became the Nacionalista Party’s favorite place of leisure, so much so that they later held a convention for Manuel Roxas’ presidential candidacy at the Cabaret.

A well-regarded local composer would scribble down his kundiman on the napkins there - drunk. Mentions have been made of the Cabaret in contemporary novels of Tagalog writers. International personalities also visited. Famed big band leader Benny Goodman even performed at the Cabaret's stage, jamming together with the house band. Indeed the Cabaret's reputation was global, it was even featured in Life magazine.

For soldiers and sailors, the Cabaret was on their bucket list of places to visit once they were docked in Manila. For John Canson, a man who came from nothing, the Cabaret was his place; his domain where can he lord over very important people, even if it were just for a few hours. For once in his life, he too felt important. For once in his life, he was a some-body. His hard work and strong will led him to where he was, looking proudly over the foyer at what he had achieved. This was his Xanadu. This was his American Dream.

▪︎ WHEN THE MUSIC STOPPED ▪︎

It was December 7th of 1941. The patrons of Santa Ana Cabaret were going about with the festivities, drinking and laughing in merriment, dancing away in their fox-trot cotillion. None of them would have suspected that this would be the last night of halcyon.

The following day, the Second World War officially arrived on Philippine shores... and so did the Axis. The Axis powers - by way of their Eastern emissary, the Japanese army - made their presence known via an air raid on Clark Air Base, a mere ten hours after they had on Pearl Harbor. But it was only a warning.

The Japanese assimilated Lingayen Gulf by December 22nd; working their way through Manila. On a gloomy Christmas, MacArthur declared Manila an open city and moved the Commonwealth Government to Corregidor. A week later, on January 2nd of 1942, the Japanese occupied Manila.

MacArthur fled for Australia on March 11th. President Quezon proceeded his move to the United States in order to operate his government-in-exile there. Not before long, he instructed José Laurel to take charge as the liaison between the Japanese and the Filipino people, hoping this will lessen the sting of occupation.

Quezon never returned, succumbing to tuberculosis. President Laurel ushered in a critical era in the Philippines as a puppet state of Japan. As the new set of colonisers proceeded to strengthen their hold, citizens - Filipino and American alike - were captured and imprisoned. Among them was Canson, who was ejected from his throne and whisked away to a concentration camp in Los Baños.

In Canson's absence, the Cabaret's wide space became a garment factory for the Japanese army. The consequences of the War would gravely affect the already strenuous social divisions of the country, with the Philippine elite - some of whom Canson had remembered celebrating their best years at the Cabaret - collaborating with the Japanese.

MacArthur returned in the tail-end of 1944.  Beginning on January 9th, his troops arrived on Lingayen Gulf and gradually took hold of Luzon. It took most of February to reclaim Manila, but once they did, POWs were liberated. Among them was a grateful Canson, who generously offered the Cabaret as a make-shift hospital for the wounded.

▪︎ LIFE AFTER PEACE TIME ▪︎

The War came and went, and the Cabaret resumed operations. While on the surface, the effects of the War were not seen, its spectre continued to be felt. A few years into his reinstated tenure, Old Man Canson realised it was time to retire. He turned the property over to his son, John Jr., in 1953.

The younger Canson decided to extinguish the Cabaret's stigma of being an elitist establishment. Hence, he allowed the Cabaret to open its doors to working-class Filipino men seeking to dance their woes away. He devised a protocol where patrons could pay a few centavos for a ticket, which bought a few hours of dancing, dining, and being in the company of "guest relations officers".

While the Cabaret did thrive after the war, it was never the same. The boom of more accessible establishments, as well as the neighbourhood's deterioration, contributed to its rapid decline in terms of popularity and quality. Its wood furnishes had suffered dilapidation since the War. Testimonies of its latter-day operations describe the Cabaret as a "dark" and "trashy" place where the "dancers looked dismal," a "far cry" from the high-class establishment relished by their fathers and uncles.

John Canson died in 1960; his legacy to Philippine society now a shade of its once-lustrous self. The issue of the joint being a "cabaret" re-surfaced and would this time provide its commercial undoing, as the term now carried a negative connotation of sex and sin. It was a taboo of a morally repressed nation smothered predominantly on a tight Catholic upbringing.

▪︎ A BITTER-SWEET END ▪︎

In the first quarter of 1970, there were talks of the Makati government purchasing the property with the intention of putting up a public high school in its place.

Apparently this did not push through, and later that year, in November, the Cabaret became one casualty of a flood caused by Typhoon Patsy [Yoling]. Ironic how it withstood the carpet bombings of the War but couldn't stand a chance against the forces of Mother Nature. By then, its ruins resembled an abandoned haunted house. The neighboring residents utilised its vast tracts of land as a place to plant their home-grown crops.

This would be referred to as the "Garden." The young children made the Garden their play-ground and their favourite spot was the large tree near where the Cansons' abode once stood. At the turn of the decade, President Marcos enacted the BLISS [Bagong Lipunan Improvement of Sites and Services] housing project and converted the property into one of many developments for low-income families to reside.

Today, the Tejeros Garden BLISS apartment complex stands in its place. Its tattered roofs and withered walls tell the song of Santa Ana Cabaret. From its days as a small social club to its re-vamp as the dance hall of the century, from the shackles of War to the twilight years of obscurity, it was a chronicle of Manila's brief ascent as a nacreous premiere city recognised beyond the Pearl of the Orient.

Through it all, this was the story of John Canson. Of his good times and his bad. The faint strains from the popular song, Ahlert and Turk's "I Don't Know Why", fits the Cabaret's perennial tune and continue to loom the stifling evening air. We don't know why, either. Some-times, parties have to end.