David byrne broadway11/10/2023 ![]() 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.Įven 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. And with my spirit and character of mothering, I want to mother not only the Philippines but the world.”Įmulating 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. 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. 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. The latter still calls herself the country’s “mother,” as though trying to enlist gay Twitter to cheer her renaissance. 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. Photo: Billy Bustamante, Matthew Murphy, and Evan Zimmerman.Īn emphasis on destiny pervaded the Marcoses’ propaganda. 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.ĭavid Byrne and Fatboy Slim, Here Lies Love, 2023. 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. 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. 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 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. 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. ![]() Photo: Billy Bustamante, Matthew Murphy, and Evan Zimmerman. ![]() Imelda Marcos and Ferdinand Marcos (Arielle Jacobs and Jose Llana). ![]() David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, Here Lies Love, 2023. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |