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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 pre-show 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.)
Years of development, including a full production at the Public, in 2013, have forged the song cycle into a chronological sequence, with each number contextualized through video montages, by Peter Nigrini. These samplings of archival film clips and often jarring data points (about, for instance, mass torture) are the main way that the show communicates key plot developments. What makes a larger impact, though, is a giddy sense of movement: the show’s director, Alex Timbers, and its superb choreographer, Annie-B Parson, whisk the performers across the space’s moving platforms, and even up into catwalks along the balcony, sometimes just to instruct the audience when and how to boogie. Justin Townsend’s wall-of-color lights, David Korins’s mammoth night-club set, and Clint Ramos’s vivid costumes create a setting that both sends up the real Imelda’s passion for Studio 54 glitz and aims to have its own hedonistic fun. (The show’s unlikely mix of morality play and G-rated rave felt less freighted, at the Public, before 2022 and the ascent of Imelda’s son, Bongbong Marcos, to the Presidency of the Philippines.)
Kleptocracy requires scrupulous image management, and Imelda excelled at playing the provincial sweetheart and the glamorous ambassador, as power demanded. Imelda in “Love” occasionally looks like an old-model Tyrant Barbie: Jacobs changes clothes constantly, and she’s exquisite in terno dresses with high butterfly shoulders. The character is as psychologically developed as a plastic doll, too, but Jacobs, her forceful voice hectic in the upper reaches, interprets the role as a kind of Junior Miss Evita, attempting to invest songs like “Why Don’t You Love Me?” (which seems to be addressed to people Imelda may have had murdered) with the pathos of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.”
Byrne is clearly interested in political rhetoric—he drew many of his lyrics from statements made by Imelda, Marcos, and their rival and moral foil, Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino (played by Conrad Ricamora), tinkering with their words for meter and tone. In musicals, characters typically sing their inner truths, but here the songs often reduce a character’s interiority. In a variety of glossy bops, we hear things Imelda said publicly, such as her vapid claim that she wants the epitaph “Here Lies Love” on her tombstone. I went home and watched Ramona S. Diaz’s excellent 2003 documentary, “Imelda,” in which the ex-First Lady, then in her unrepentant seventies, mouths a lot of bizarre sentimental cant. Unfortunately, when sung, this kind of dreck is indistinguishable from bad lyric writing. (On the “Love” concept album, that irony was more explicit and therefore funnier.)
Reprising their roles from the Public production, both leading men have worked out ways to be uninhibited in the show while commenting wryly on it. (Llana’s family fled the Philippines when he was three.) Ricamora makes a virtue of his character’s hieratic flatness by compressing his voice into a Byrne-like drone, and Llana exaggerates a honeyed sensuality, letting his performance rot a little in the heat. For a few weeks this summer, the extraordinary Broadway diva Lea Salonga appears as Ninoy’s mother, who rallies the country after her son is assassinated. There are moments when you feel the all-Filipino cast turning to address its compatriots, and an anthem sung by Salonga is one of these—a salvo of arrows, tearing through the room to specific targets.
It’s neither an Aquino nor a Marcos who plays the main character in “Here Lies Love,” though. It’s the crowd itself, and the show’s effectiveness depends on whether that character changes. Will the throng be seduced by the Marcoses’ glamour once more, or will the people rise against it? Newly built mezzanine-level galleries run along the stage, so that audience members on three sides can look down into the milling horde below. The floor audience, in effect, plays both the adoring masses at Imelda’s campaign appearances and the victorious demonstrators at the People Power Revolution, in 1986, when Ferdinand Marcos was pushed out. In asking three hundred or so theatregoers to evolve seamlessly from Marcos partisans to revolutionary heroes, Timbers, Byrne, and Parson would like to highlight our own shifting mob mentality. But can you bake your critique and eat it, too? Imelda’s cardinal sin was greed; this production, even more than the one at the Public, is an exercise in ecstatic excess. I came away thinking not about revolution but about how gullible crowds are. “It takes a woman to do a man’s job,” Imelda sings at her disappointing husband, after he’s betrayed her. People around me cheered at her girl-boss confidence. Perhaps they hadn’t heard what that job entailed? Some women aren’t supposed to lean in.
There’s a type of spectacle that operates at the other end of the spectrum: tiny instead of grand, intimate instead of impressive. For a just closed, sold-out-before-you-heard-about-it production of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” only forty people could squeeze into the Chelsea loft where it was performed. This ascetic yet starry project, with its exclusive micro-audiences, recalled Andre Gregory’s legendary three-year “Vanya” workshop, a stripped-down chamber version presented to invitation-only groups, which eventually became the subject of Louis Malle’s film “Vanya on 42nd Street,” from 1994. Here the cast included Marin Ireland as the heartsick Sonya, Bill Irwin as her father, and David Cromer as Vanya—and, as in Gregory’s workshop, proximity allowed us to hear the play at its most naturalistic.
Of course, the director Jack Serio, who revealed a deft hand staging Joey Merlo’s murmur-quiet play “On Set with Theda Bara” last February, wasn’t able to spend three years with his “Vanya” actors. In the loft, he wasn’t entirely successful in wrangling the cast’s wild variety of approaches. Two of the strongest performances actually diverged the most: Will Brill played the self-destructive doctor Astrov with fine-grained, rabbitlike wariness, while Irwin’s mannered grotesque was a George Grosz painting come to life. In Ireland’s scenes with them, she often had to swing between extremes, adjusting herself to each actor’s chosen mode.
The show as a whole may have wobbled from such instability, but at least for Ireland the resulting flexibility made her Sonya into something I’d never seen before. The character is meant to be young but plain; Ireland is too lovely for the part and also too old for it, and these unsuitabilities, in tension, managed to cut her into Sonya’s perfect shape. I may forget some of this “Vanya,” but not the heart-stopping scene, in candlelight, when Ireland’s Sonya and Brill’s Astrov nearly dropped into each other’s arms. Serio does his finest work when voices are low, and he surpassed himself here, holding his own directorial breath as Sonya and Astrov, contra even Chekhov, teetered on the brink. ♦
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