Let’s get the shoes out of the way. Here Lies Love, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s pop musical about Imelda Marcos, does not dwell on the kleptocrat’s notorious shoe collection.
The show’s take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward Marco’s shoe fetish extends to the audience, many of them Filipino-Americans whose families fled the country under Ferdinand Marcos’s despotic regime. At a recent preview, the ground was thick with Hokas and On Clouds, Air Maxes and Reeboks. It wasn’t just a communal repudiation of what, by now, has become a cliched symbol of the former first lady’s boundless greed. The production is a roof-raising musical presented as interactive disco and the audience was all too ready to dance off against a modern-day Marie Antoinette.
The theater is divided into four quadrants and the orchestra seats have been cleared out to make room for a dance floor. Seated ticket holders, safely ensconced in the balcony and in the theater’s wings, shouldn’t get too comfortable. A DJ (Moses Villarma) who MCs with the vim and volume of an impresario at a Las Vegas boxing match, regularly entreating the house to rise up and make some noise.
The set is designed by David Korins, whose previous works include Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen, as well as the touring Van Gogh show that reimagined an art exhibition as a light and sound experience. The word “immersive” might strike fear in your heart, but Here Lies Love gets it right. This is not a Broadway extravaganza drunk on its stagecraft. Colorful costumes change at breakneck speed, confetti and disco balls (Marcos was a Studio 54 regular) rain down from on high and video clips play on the myriad screens that encircle the theater (a particular thrill kicks in the moment you realize the black-and-white old-timey newscast of a young Ferdinand making a play for votes is live footage of actor Jose Llana serenading audience members.)
With its reliance on catchy beats to liven up history, there are echoes of Hamilton as well as Six, the Broadway hit about Henry VIII’s wives that culminates in a long-awaited rise-from-your-seats dance party. But Here Lies Love, which melds dirty dancing with dirty politics, rouses audience members from the jump.
Despite its glitter factor, its production values hew low-key, sometimes calling to mind a high school theater production. Throughout the show, techies push a series of wheeled platforms into different configurations around the main floor, and actors mount the moving stages for so-close-you-can-touch-them song and dance routines. A team of ushers, kitted out in pink jumpsuits and glittery eye makeup, use glow sticks to communicate with the audience and ensure that there are no traffic violations as the stage configuration constantly reinvents itself and cast members weave through the crowd to perform melodramatic anthems and sweaty dance offs. Arielle Jacobs (better known as Jasmine from Broadway’s Aladdin) plays the former first lady with an earnest conviction that stops a hair shy of sympathetic. Her flowering from a down-at-the-heel small-town girl into a diva with a philandering husband and a hefty mother complex (Marcos viewed herself as, above all, the mother of the Filipino people) is wondrous to behold. At the start of the show, Jacobs’s affect is unremarkably sugary. What follows over the next one and a half hours is a jaw-dropping glow-up. Her voice becomes stronger, her blindness to the suffering of the people as thick as her furs and bouffant.
Enfolding the unbelievable story of Filipino history into 90 earsplitting minutes means much will be left out. Marcos’s reliance on pills and her heartbreak over her husband’s infidelity make the cut, but we don’t see much of her famous greed and opulence, nor Caluit, the small island whose residents she evacuated in order to create a sanctuary for the exotic animals that caught her fancy while on vacation in Africa – animals that ended up inbreeding and failing to thrive (to learn more about this wretched chapter of Marcos’s legacy, watch Lauren Greenfield’s damning 2019 documentary The Kingmaker).
Here Lies Love, whose title comes from a quote of Marcos’s concerning the words she hopes appear on her tombstone, plays like an animated sketchbook. Byrne and Slim (AKA Norman Cook) collaborated on an Imelda Marcos concept album in 2010. Though it features cameos by legends such as Florence Welsh and Natalie Merchant, as well as regular contributions from Byrne himself, it feels more pastiche than actual pleasure-conveyor and plays through as a cerebral experiment. Though the latest theatrical iteration fails to transform any of the songs into unforgettable anthems that fans will be blasting out of car windows for years to come, the all-Filipino cast breathes life and feeling into the original source material.
In recent weeks, the show has been criticized for glossing over the pain of the Filipinos who suffered at a corrupt family’s hands. But judging by the sentiment that surged during scenes fronted by longtime Marcos challenger Ninoy Aquino (an enthralling Conrad Ricamora) and the closing song, an acoustic number whose lyrics are a pastiche of lines from anti-Marcos protesters, there’s little question as to who are the true heroes of this effervescent production.
