NEW YORK, NY.- Its the applause including my own I find troubling.
Not that there isnt plenty to praise in Here Lies Love, the immersive disco-bio-musical about Imelda Marcos that opened Thursday at the Broadway Theater. The infernally catchy songs by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, performed by a tireless and inspired all-Filipino cast, will have you clapping whether you want to or not. Their chunky beats, abetted by insistent dance motivators, may even prompt you to bop at your seat if you have one.
Because the real star of this show is the astonishing architectural transformation of the theater itself, by set designer David Korins. Opened in 1924 as a movie palace, more lately the home of King Kong and West Side Story, the Broadway has now been substantially gutted, its nearly 1,800 seats reduced to about 800, with standing room for an additional 300 in the former orchestra section and a 42-inch disco ball dead center.
The folks upstairs, if not the mostly younger standees below, will surely recognize the visual reference to Studio 54, the celebrity nightclub where Marcos, the first lady of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986, danced away the last decade of her reign while impoverishing her people. That she would probably adore the over-emphatic atmosphere of Here Lies Love with its lurid lighting by Justin Townsend, skittering projections by Peter Nigrini and earsplitting sound by M.L. Dogg and Cody Spencer is, however, equivocal praise.
For here we are, at the place where irony and meta-messaging form a theatrical-historical knot that cant be picked apart. Which is why, as you clap, you should probably wonder what for.
Is it for Imelda (Arielle Jacobs), the beauty queen who rose from hand-me-downs and scraps to become the fashion-plate wife of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos? Is it for the ruthless Ferdinand himself (Jose Llana)? (His landslide election in 1965 elicited some Pavlovian cheers the night I saw the show.) Or is it for Ninoy Aquino (Conrad Ricamora), the opposition leader who was Imeldas former beau? (Having spurned her in their youth, he was later assassinated by forces thought to be close to Ferdinands regime.) All get equivalent star treatment here.
The confusion of sympathies is just where Byrne and director Alex Timbers want us. Avoiding the near-hagiography of Evita and yet unwilling to bank a commercial production on a totally hateful character, they aim for a middle ground that doesnt exist, yet mostly hit it anyway. Their Imelda is a victim of poverty and mistreatment, dim despite her cunning and innocent by reason of inanity. When Filipinos fully turn against her during the People Power revolution of 1986, she is more mystified than crushed. Why dont you love me? she sings.
We know the answer: The string of her outrages, even apart from her husbands, seems literally endless. She did not retire from public office until 2019, and her son, Bongbong, is now president.
But Here Lies Love the title taken from an epitaph she proposed for herself tempers the atrocities with the pleasure of its songs. Jacobs, a Broadway Jasmine in Aladdin, gets the catchiest ones, and delivers them well, if without the emotional nuance Ruthie Ann Miles brought to the role a decade earlier when the show had a developmental run at the Public Theater.
To be fair, the material steers as far from emotion as possible, no matter how many times the word love is used. Byrnes characteristic idiom which feeds disco, folk and pop through an art rock filter is too cool for that, and his lyrics, perhaps because they are based on public utterances of the real-life figures, reject psychology almost entirely. They are often thus too banal to serve the usual purpose of songs in musicals; instead of developing character internally they suggest it externally with a torrent of catchphrases. It takes a woman to do a mans job, Imelda sings blankly upon assuming power from the sickly Ferdinand.
Without a vivid inner life to inflect such cliches, its hard to wring anything from them except a cringe. The beamish Ricamora and the scowling Llana, returning from the earlier production, get around the problem with their charisma, and Lea Salonga, in the cameo role of Aquinos mother, turns Just Ask the Flowers, sung at Ninoys funeral, into a powerful if perplexing anthem through sheer vocal bravura.
Still, a musical not centered on feelings is a strange thing. Where another show might attempt to squeeze the relationship between Imelda and Ninoy for drama, it is merely a lump of undigested fact here. And Imeldas infamous collection of state-financed shoes goes unmentioned, which is like mounting Evita without the Dior dress.
To compensate, or double down, Timbers emphasizes pure pageantry in his staging. The actors often perform on an array of moving platforms that transport the action to various parts of the theater while incidentally sweeping the standees into new configurations. (Guides in pink jumpsuits with airport-style light wands keep them from getting mowed down.) You are left to draw your own conclusions about how crowds, whether in Manila or Manhattan, respond to being pushed around for too long and for apparently arbitrary reasons. Theres a reason affiliations and uprisings are often called movements.
No surprise then that the most expressive element in Here Lies Love (along with Clint Ramos costumes, which also move beautifully) is the choreography by Annie-B Parson. Based on small hand gestures and large traffic patterns, it suggests a fuller spectrum of human engagement than the otherwise narrowly focused and sometimes mechanical production achieves.
Is it wrong to seek that engagement more fully? (Or as Imelda sings: Is it a sin to love too much?) For most of its 90 intermission-less minutes, Here Lies Love finesses the question, preferring to be treated as anything an art object, a dance party besides what it is. In that way, it recalls Byrnes Broadway concert American Utopia, on which Timbers and Parson also collaborated. But that show, which had no story, needed only to be sleek and enjoyable to score its points.
Here Lies Love bets that glamour can make up for narrative or, rather, that in a show about the dangers of political demagoguery, glamour itself is the narrative. Its a case of form follows function into the fire. We are drawn to cultural and political excitement in much the same, often dangerous way.
Perhaps the irony of making a musical about that is more viscerally appreciable down on the dance floor. It was for me at the Public, where almost everyone had to stand and be part of the story, not observers of it. (There were only 42 seats.) And perhaps, 10 years later, with our own politics looking a lot more like the Marcoses, no one can afford to keep a distance.
In any case, on Broadway, its not until the gorgeous last song, God Draws Straight, that the material matches the movement in a way that reaches the balcony. Led by Moses Villarama, and based on comments by eyewitnesses to the peaceful 1986 revolution, it acknowledges the moral superiority of its real heroes the Philippine people in the only way a musical can: by giving it beautiful voice. Finally, its OK to applaud.
Here Lies Love
At the Broadway Theater, Manhattan; herelieslovebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.