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.
