The first thing that strikes you at “Here Lies Love,” David Byrne’s participatory pop musical about Imelda Marcos, is a color. As befits the summer of “Barbie,” the entire Broadway Theatre (the venue’s actual name) seems to have been submerged in a grenadine cocktail: pink L.E.D.s in the lobby’s chandeliers saturate the white plasterwork, and, farther inside, the space has been reconfigured into a huge warehouse-style disco, pulsing with fuchsia and purple neon. The audience members braving the dance floor appear to be swimming in raspberry sauce, herded by ushers in magenta jumpsuits, who wave pink light-up traffic batons. The d.j. (Moses Villarama) supervises a preshow beat that goes oomph-oomph-oomph. We see pink with our eyes closed; even the shadows are having a hot time.
After the introductory hype—we make some noise when the d.j. tells us to—we meet Imelda (Arielle Jacobs), the sixteen year-old Rose of Tacloban, a small-town beauty queen who will swell into a self-mythologizing co-despot of the Philippines. For decades, Imelda and her husband, the President and eventual dictator Ferdinand Marcos ( Jose Llana), embezzled billions, a level of state theft that needed nine years of brutal martial law in order to operate at scale. But, the disco vibe implies, that doesn’t mean we have to have a lousy night! A swift, ninety-minute retelling of Filipino history from 1945 to 1986 plays out in danceable songs by Byrne, who first released “Love” as a concept album, in 2010, co-written with the d.j. slash beatsmith Fatboy Slim. (Tom Gandey and José Luis Pardo also collaborated on certain songs with Byrne.)
This story is from the July 31, 2023 edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the July 31, 2023 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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