David Byrne brings Imelda Marcos to Broadway

IN IMELDA, Ramona S. Diaz’s 2003 documentary, former first lady of the Philippines Imelda Marcos stands over her autarch husband’s unburied and uncannily pickled cadaver, declaring that her own tombstone, when the time comes, should read “Here lies love”; little does she know she’s titling an immersive musical reuniting David Byrne and Fatboy Slim following their maiden 2008 collaboration, “Toe Jam.” In this pageant of camp and control, the epitaph becomes a maudlin self-own for a figure who transformed from a symbol of rebirth into one of vulgar opulence and theft, and an accomplice to Ferdinand Marcos’s reign of mass incarceration, torture, and murder. 

Here Lies Love first took form as a 2010 electropop-disco-funk salad of a concept album (featuring chanteuses Cyndi Lauper, Tori Amos, Sharon Jones, Florence Welch, Sia, Santigold, and others), then was adapted into a musical, a critical darling directed by Alex Timbers at The Public Theater. A decade later, after productions in London and Seattle, it reemerges now with an all-Filipino cast, in a divisive glow-up of Timbers’s previous staging, currently playing in one of Broadway’s biggest houses. 

Here Lies Love troubles the sentimentalism of musical theater with Byrne’s trademark genre-hodgepodge distanciation, applied to a story collaged largely from utterances of the Marcoses and those in and against their orbit. In ninety minutes, the audience of this dictatorial dance-party musical sees the world’s infatuation with the despotic shopaholic who likened herself to love personified turn to disenchantment, then to a corpse. Fascinating and baffling, this spectacle mosaicked together from fragmentary perceptions spins unstoppably like its disco ball centerpiece, only occasionally reflecting back something as pointed as its title. 

An emphasis on destiny pervaded the Marcoses’ propaganda. In part, they shaped their public image around the Philippine creation myth of Malakas and Maganda, commissioning painter Evan Cosayo for a paradisiac depiction of the couple: Ferdinand lithe, bare-chested and knife-wielding, Imelda in a breeze-blissed swirl of long hair and gossamer fabric, emerging from bamboo as the folkloric parents of the Philippines. The latter still calls herself the country’s “mother,” as though trying to enlist gay Twitter to cheer her renaissance. She twists herself in knots to brand her infamous extravagance as maternalism and to divert attention from the atrocities of her husband’s regime—and the near-decade of Martial Law under which it smothered the country. In the 2019 documentary The Kingmaker (by Queen of Versailles filmmaker Lauren Greenfield), Marcos emphasizes, “I was always criticized for being excessive, but that is mothering; that is the spirit of mothering. You cannot quantify love. And with my spirit and character of mothering, I want to mother not only the Philippines but the world.” 

Emulating the Marcoses’ rhetoric of divine right, the nearly sung-through musical fast-forwards across the greatest hits in Imelda’s life, the hyperdrive pacing making each feel like an inevitability. This Luhrmann-esque approach captures the blindsiding haste of brutal historical arcs while largely eliding the Marcoses’ policies and ideologies in favor of their cultivated personae.

Even with its aspirations to explode Imelda’s public image into immersive space, the show omits some of the more revealing aspects of her self-mythology: the insistence on “mothering” the country, for one. Her eviction of over 250 mostly Indigenous Tagbanwa families from Calauit Island to create a safari park with animals shipped from the African savanna (many of which now suffer from inbreeding and neglect) is also missing from this tale that paints her inhumane indulgences in too-broad strokes, glossing over the bizarre particularities that would distinguish the Marcoses’ rule from the generalized tropes of dystopian entertainment. Though Here Lies Love attempts to process its anti-heroine through public words and images, it notably avoids unpacking the overdetermined symbol of the shoe collection that’s earned her the defanged reputation of a kleptocratic Carrie Bradshaw. Imelda’s so-called “edifice complex,” which saw her impoverishing the country to erect brutalist symbols of national cohesion and prosperity, is invoked in the sardonic number “Fabulous One,” but still feels underexplored, given how lucidly it speaks to Marcos’s, and the show’s, fixations on spectacle and façade.

Here Lies Love Begins with Imelda’s rise—following a childhood spent within the garage-dwelling side of an otherwise wealthy family—to teenage beauty queendom as the “Rose of Tacloban.” Played by a gripping Arielle Jacobs (Jasmine in Aladdin on Broadway), Imelda elaborates in dulcet tones a naïve worldview premised on love and beauty. In Disney movies, we never see the epilogue of the archetypal princess’s happily ever after, when absolute power militarizes that sweetness—so while this makes for a compelling fractured fairytale, Byrne’s and Timbers’s depiction of Imelda as a committed if pathological idealist nonetheless seems like a facile take on the character’s motivations.

We see Imelda’s dalliance with Ninoy Aquino, who would go on to become one of the Marcoses’ loudest detractors. (He is played by Conrad Ricamora, adjoining a deadpan Byrne-ishness with a charisma that cuts through the overlord-and-lady’s pitched-up spectacle). She then enters a precipitous courtship with her strongman in shining armor, the young, ambitious senator Ferdinand (a commanding Jose Llana). Eleven days after meeting, they are married. The show moves so breathlessly that shortly after the newlyweds sing a cloying honeymoon reverie—“Puffy white clouds both near and far / flowers exploding in my heart”—she’s grappling with his tape-recorded affair with C-list American actress Dovie Beams. Next, civil unrest stirs, with Aquino as its righteous spoon. When the Plaza Miranda is bombed—an attack suspected by many to have been an inside job by the power-grabbing Marcos regime—Ferdinand exploits tragedy to order Martial Law and ensure his reign for another fourteen years. The musical ends in the chilling tonal shift with the imprisonment, exile, return, and assassination of Aquino, followed by a lament from his bereaved mother, the subsequent rise of the People Power Revolution, and its overthrow of the Marcoses.

The aforesaid is depicted in the production’s first acoustic song, whose hopeful inflection is offset by a last-minute allusion to the Marcoses’ son, Bongbong, becoming president. (The daughter of Rodrigo Duterte, infamous for his own regime’s extrajudicial killings, is his veep.) Oddly unmentioned: Less than a decade after her exile, Imelda, a “fantastic zombie whose pathetic drama will never die,” as writer Gina Apostol characterizes her in the Los Angeles Review of Books, would return and eventually rise into the role of congresswoman. Because the show was conceived over a decade ago, it largely treats the Marcoses’ rise and fall as a closed story, but for a new epilogue spoken in a brief, direct audience address: a suddenly earnest if anodyne warning about the global precarity of democracy.

David Korins, the designer who put Alexander Hamilton on a lazy Susan and immersed Emily Cooper and one-in-ninety other Americans in van Gogh, has reimagined the Broadway Theatre’s standard proscenium as a discotheque resembling Imelda’s preferred neighborhood watering hole, Studio 54. The production purged the orchestra seating, installing in its stead a giant dance floor veined with mobile modular catwalks, along which Pepto-pink jumpsuited ushers kettle audience members around the singing Marcoses—replicating all the joys of a Brooklyn Trader Joes line while insisting it’s just like the club. A seated audience still occupies the Broadway Theatre’s mezzanine, stoically observing the spectators turned participants below—as though watching the seduction of a new regime on the world stage. If they look closely, they’ll see how stilted much of the dancing is, fittingly dictated by an army of audience wranglers dressed in the color of forced fun. 

Here Lies Love choreographer Annie-B Parson sets mesmerically robotic gestural dances—looking like zhuzhed-up in-flight safety presentations—to Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s melodically inviting yet lyrically stiff music. Dancing here, whether by audience or ensemble, is meant to recreate the spell the Marcoses cast: “She didn’t put a table between her and Nixon or Castro. She asked them to dance,” Parson told The New York Times, noting Imelda’s intoxicating potion of disco and diplomacy. “A woman knows relationships / that’s why I make my little trips,” Imelda at one point coos. (Needless to say, the Marcoses’ authoritarian magic was amenable to the interests of American empire. The United States’s undying support for their regime, even as it rushed toward totalitarianism, had much to do with military bases on the former US colony, and the tyrant’s fervent anticommunism.)

With its found-text collectanea, the show’s first half traps audiences in the Marcoses’ political myth-making—and for this reason has been accused of glorifying the Philippines’ prodigal first lady and its “conjugal dictatorship” (a coinage made by journalist Primitivo Mijares soon before he vanished, one among the scores of desaparecidos of the Marcos years). Jesse Green, in the Times, begins, “It’s the applause—including my own—I find troubling.” In The Daily Beast, Tim Teeman calls Here Lies Love “almost magnificently grotesque”—inveighing against the musical for “trivializ[ing] dictatorship and real-life horror—especially egregious given the political period we are living in.” The charm offensive, however, feels rather like a successful attempt at reproducing the profound political effect of vibes. Here lies the now-familiar lesson of this undead disco: Affect is the essence of political fandom and control. As Marcos herself put it in The Kingmaker, “Perception is real, but the truth is not.”

“Immersive” theater, particularly the participatory subgenre, has always felt like a misnomer: It more often creates in the viewer an awkward self-awareness, whereas erasing oneself in the dark of a theater and submitting to a story more resembles immersion. On one hand, being a sheep in Here Lies Love’s feel-bad dance-along mirrors authoritarian allegiance—“an obeisance innocent and obscene,” as Apostol writes. On the other hand, it is also a sly counterintuitive tool of Brechtian alienation. If music here makes the sheeple come together, a bit of discomfort, annoyance, and cognitive dissonance give us consciousness.

— Moze Halperin

Here Lies Love is currently playing at the Broadway Theatre in New York.