Here Lies Love
Opening Night: July 20, 2023
Theater: Broadway Theatre
Website: herelieslovebroadway.com
Here Lies Love is a groundbreaking musical about former Filipina First Lady Imelda Marcos’ astonishing rise to power and subsequent fall at the hands of the Philippine People Power Revolution.
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July 20, 2023
It’s the applause — including my own — I find troubling.
Not that there isn’t plenty to praise in “Here Lies Love,” the immersive disco-bio-musical about Imelda Marcos that opened on 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.
July 20, 2023
As a frequenter of both, it was easy to surrender to “Here Lies Love.” But that ease feels directly tied to my lack of cultural connection to the musical’s complicated history. The production boasts that it can be enjoyed by all, but who decides when populism helps Filipino people — offering greater representation to a wider audience — and when it harms them?
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July 20, 2023
Director Alex Timbers and set designer David Korins have revolutionized and radicalized the capacious Broadway Theatre into a gleaming dance club, walled by dozens of video screens, where audience members—often literally standing in the middle of the action—get swept up in the shifting tides and undertows of history.
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July 20, 2023
As Imelda, Jacobs plays the ambitious, starry-eyed youth pleasantly enough, and does fine in conveying the latter stages of cynical corruption. But Here Lies Love offers only a half-hearted stab at bridging the two chronological extremes of Imelda’s life, with little attempt at explaining the making of this particular political monster. Perhaps that’s why Here Lies Love, for all its impressive confidence, feels a bit thin in afterthought. Maybe a musical needs a central character who can sing “Why Don’t You Love Me?” without it coming off like an anthem to cluelessness.
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July 20, 2023
And just like that, a decade went by. Politics have changed, the world has transformed, and the theater industry is certainly different than it was back in the simpler time of 2013. But one thing’s certain in this smoggy summer of 2023: David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s Here Lies Love — you know, the immersive Imelda Marcos disco musical — is on Broadway for the first time and it is the party to end all parties.
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July 20, 2023
Immersive theater should feel participatory and intriguing, but right from the beginning Here Lies Love (Broadway Theatre, booking to Sept 3) feels hectoring—before ultimately becoming a big, baffling Broadway mess.
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July 20, 2023
No, “Here Lies Love” isn’t about Ferdinand or Imelda or even a bygone Philippines. It’s all about Alex Timbers.
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July 20, 2023
It asks us to embody the ambition, mendacity, and ruthlessness we carry with us, even when we think we’ve danced them off, and question our complicity. After the non-stop party, the show’s sobering end reminds us that dancing can be as inattentive as it is cathartic.
READ THE REVIEWJuly 20, 2023
What may be most remarkable about “Here Lies Love” is how deftly it pivots from the celebratory and even sentimental presentation of Imelda’s rise to the inevitably condemnatory, as we witness the assassination of Aquino at the airport upon his return from exile.
READ THE REVIEWJuly 20, 2023
Some will see her as a good and decent person bamboozled by her unfaithful husband, a position the show supports. Some will argue that the old global powerhouses like the U.S. carry the real structural blame for what happened. And some will see the show as a problematic Marcos rehab project, especially given that their son now is running the very same country and has a vested interest therein.
And then some will just dance, laugh and ponder the passage of time (Imelda is 96), the perennial global curse of poverty and corruption and the allure of the rich life. You pick your spot and your mind and senses are thoroughly engaged.
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July 20, 2023
The point, as elsewhere in the show, is to get the audience grooving with the synthy messaging of dictatorship, with enough moral dissonance to make your stomach churn as your feet keep moving—a that’s how they get you parable.
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July 20, 2023
And standing in the theater that once hosted the original production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Evita” — a similar story about Argentina’s power-hungry first lady Eva Peron — makes you crave a stronger point of view on Marcos, rather than just an excuse for party time. The musical, somewhat shallowly, paints the woman as a kindly victim who was swept up by the decadence and momentum as much as we are. That aside, it is indeed awfully easy to lose yourself to the glamorous escape that director Alex Timbers (“Moulin Rouge”) and his team have so splendidly built, accompanied by a devilishly catchy score.
READ THE REVIEWJuly 24, 2023
For Here Lies Love, the storied Broadway Theatre has transformed into Club Millennium, a bright, pulsating discotheque sans orchestra seats. A disc jockey (Moses Villarama) pumps up the incoming crowd as energetic ushers, clad in pink jumpsuits, play air traffic control for patrons on the dance floor. A fitting setting for a musical about the rise of a dictatorship, no?
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