‘Here Lies Love’ Broadway Review: Don’t Cry For Imelda When David Byrne & Fatboy Slim Provide The Music
deadline.comDisco despotism isn’t exactly a new genre – Cabaret hinted the way, Evita made it clear, American Psycho, in its fashion, added a variation, all in service of social horrors offset by catchy tunes – but Here Lies Love, the rambunctious new immersive musical from David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, pushes the concept to an extreme that likely won’t be matched until someone has the bright idea to transform Party Monster into The Michael Alig Musical.
In Here Lies Love, a technical marvel of an ever-moving stage production – ever-moving being the operative and quite literal phrase here – the subject is the dictatorial regime of Ferdinand Marcos, who served as the president of the Philippines from 1972 to 1982 and, in all that time, seems never to have encountered a human right he couldn’t violate.
But, as with Evita, Here Lies Love shifts the focus to the dictator’s wife, all the better for the decadent glamour and bejeweled nights on the town that contrast so nastily with widespread poverty, the crushing of political opposition and even the mysterious disappearances of old friends who carry an inconvenient truth or two.
So Byrne, Slim, (with additional music by Tom Gandey and J Pardo), director Alex Timbers, and choreographer Annie-B Parson have joined with a fine cast (and perhaps even finer creative and technical team) to bring to vivid life Imelda Marcos and her heady days and nights of celebrity hobnobbing, pill-popping, disco-dancing and blithe disregard for people whose money she squanders.
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