Here Lies Love (Broadway) (2023)

After seeing the immersive staging of Guys and Dolls on the West End, I was very excited to see the transformation of the Broadway Theatre for Here Lies Love. I unfortunately came down with Covid for the second time just the August weekend I had bought tickets for. Morgan went in my place and saw Lea Salonga. Luckily I was able to see it still before the show closes at the end of the month. 

The marketing for this show has seemingly not reached the general public. Any time I tell someone I'm going to see Here Lies Love, they ask what's that and then give a dumbfounded stare when I say "the David Byrne immersive disco musical about Imelda Marcos". Yes, this show's very existence is kind of bizarre. The premise is that reportedly Imelda was known to have partied it up at Studio 54, and so they recreate the atmosphere of a discotheque. The music is by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, and I'll say it is recognizably in the weird/cool/kind-of-catchy style of The Talking Heads (American Troglodyte especially). None of the music, save for the title song, is especially memorable/hummable but it works. The immersion is cool, but I think not quite as well executed as Guys and Dolls. The stage doesn't rise and fall, rather it rotates and so the audience moves around clockwise with it. And it's quite crowded like a nightclub such that you can't move around as much. And there is actually a proper front where the stage would normally be since the balcony still has seats. It's not actually in the round. I did like the use of live footage though. The all-Filipino cast is beautiful--a wonderful Broadway first. The dance parts were fun too, maybe less so in a seat but I had a grand ole time. 

There is a valid question to ask about whether the show glorifies Imelda. I think it starts in a way that kind of does. The crowd cheers at the election of Ferdinand Marcos and decries Ninoy Acquino's dismissal of Imelda as being too tall (Also, I need a fact check on that because it's unbelievable that Imelda was courted by both Acquino and Marcos). But the show certainly ends on the right side of history. Ninoy Acquino dies a martyr and calls out the rampant corruption and horrors of martial law. And the show ends with two poignant songs: an elegy sung for Ninoy by his mother and an acoustic sung by the DJ to lyrics set to real accounts from the People Power Revolution. I think it's also interesting to note that the concept album dates back to 2010, predating the ascensions of Bong Bong Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump. The show takes on a different urgency in 2023. It urges us to learn from history because we keep on forgetting.