Here Lies Love
Broadway Theater, New York City ★★★★
David Byrne’s new musical “does not remotely resemble a traditional Broadway show,” said Charles Isherwood in The Wall Street Journal. Conceived by the former Talking Heads frontman, with music cowritten by Byrne, the long-in-the-works production turns out to be “a disarmingly winning hybrid of disco dance party and documentary drama.” Filling the role of the show’s unlikely heroine is Imelda Marcos, former first lady of the Philippines, notorious for abandoning 3,000 pairs of shoes when she and husband, Ferdinand, fled the country in 1986. “A dizzyingly eclectic range of songs” propels the drama, which tracks how Imelda rose from poverty to become a figure whose charm and glamour supplied cover for the couple’s “savage plundering of their country’s wealth.”
In part because the lead characters are given little depth, “the real star of this show” is the space where all the pageantry unfolds, said Jesse Green in The New
York Times. The century-old Broadway Theater has been reconfigured to resemble the famed 1970s nightclub Studio 54, the action plays out on moving platforms, and much of the audience is given room and encouragement to dance. If you go, the show’s “infernally catchy” songs, performed by star Arielle Jacobs and the rest of the “inspired” all-Filipino cast, “will have you clapping whether you want to or not.”
And that’s the point, said Helen Shaw in The New Yorker. “In asking 300 or so theatergoers to evolve seamlessly from Marcos partisans to revolutionary heroes,” Byrne and company “would like to highlight our own shifting mob mentality.” Maybe it’s unfair to stage “an exercise in ecstatic excess” and then fault people for joining in. Still, the scheme worked. “I came away thinking about how gullible crowds are.”