David Byrne was on the verge of giving up. “Let’s just license it to regional theaters and high schools and see what they do with it.” Actor Conrad Ricamora? “Oh, yeah, I gave up hope. After we did it twice at the Public, and after Seattle, there wouldn’t even be talks but solid plans, and each one fell through.”
They’re referring to Here Lies Love, an immersive, sung-through disco musical about Imelda Marcos, former first lady of the Philippines and, as of last year, mother of its current president. The show was an instant sensation when it opened off-Broadway in 2013, in a refitted 140-person hall at the Public Theater, launching the careers of Ricamora and star Ruthie Ann Miles. But though London’s National Theater, in 2014, and the Seattle Repertory Theater, in 2017, were able to accommodate the production’s clubby atmosphere, which has most audience members standing for its 90-minute duration and dancing around the cast, Broadway’s proscenium stages resisted.
After the pandemic decimated New York’s live-entertainment industry, however, theater owners were eager to get their audiences back. “Here was a show they remembered as working, and already looking for a place,” says Byrne, who wrote the show’s lyrics and music (the latter with Fatboy Slim). “It’s ready to go.” So this summer Here Lies Love arrives not only on Broadway but at the 1,700-seat Broadway Theatre, one of its largest. That has been all but gutted to fit David Korins’s dance-floor set, retaining the mezzanines but constructing floorside seats around the prime standing-room area, with an overall capacity of around 1,100.
“It’s the longest road I’ve taken with a show,” says Jose Llana, who reprises his role as former president Ferdinand Marcos, whose dictatorship gripped the country from 1965 to 1986. “I think the timing is exactly what it needs to be; we are telling this story in a world where a Marcos is back in power.”
The world has indeed changed. As Llana points out, Here Lies Love debuted during the Obama administration, at a time when Benigno Aquino III—the son of former president Corazon Aquino and political revolutionary Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr., whom Ferdinand had executed—presided over the Philippines. “Telling the story back then was kind of like, Isn’t the world so great right now? And wasn’t it so bad before?” he says. “We were talking specifically about Filipino history, about how a very popular leader was elected in a landslide then became obsessed with abusing and holding on to power. After the upheaval of democracy in the last decade, it feels more relevant to remind people of what happens when you don’t learn from history.”
Like power, with greater visibility comes greater responsibility. As the production inched towards Broadway’s wider audiences, criticisms that its upbeat club anthems glamorized the Marcoses’ regime escalated, especially from Filipinos. Though the majority of its lyrics are taken directly from interviews, statements, and speeches given by the Marcoses, Aquinos, and Imelda’s childhood nanny, Estrella Cumpas, the musical has no book to explicitly contextualize the songs’ thematic and emotional layers, meaning audiences must maintain their own critical, historical eye as they’re flooded with feel-good campaign speeches and flurries of unchecked, delusional vanity.
“This is not a superhero movie,” says Byrne. “You don’t want your villain to be completely evil right from the start, and the audience, in our case, stands for the Filipino people who were seduced by the Marcoses before, little by little, things turned to the dark side.” And so the titular song, performed by a teenage Imelda and titled after what she once said she’d like her tombstone to read, is as infectious as it is sentimental, and miles away from her final, baldly manipulative number, “Why Don’t You Love Me?”
“The trap,” Llana echoes, “is that a lot of people, knowing what the Marcoses did, hold them up as villains. But at the same time, you can’t release yourself from history. On the surface, it sounds like we’re a musical that’s glorifying the Marcoses, so there’s been a lot of pushback from Filipinos and journalists I respect who say it doesn’t look like something they want to see. That’s hard to respond to because, as artists, you want to say, ‘I don’t want to tell you something, I want you to see it and let the art speak for itself.’” He adds that the production team has done extensive outreach in the Filipino community to get audiences into the theater and, hopefully, to jump-start conversation.
The creative team considered how to make it crystal clear that they in no way condoned the Marcoses’ actions—which included placing the country under a 14-year martial law, during which time dissidents were silenced and citizens had to obey a curfew even as the bejeweled first lady partied away at Studio 54 and cozied up to Reagan and other questionable leaders. (“I remember the Marcoses being held up as this exemplary government that was sympathetic to the US, and our country had this unfortunate habit of harboring dictators,” Byrne quips of the Marcoses’ eventual exile to Hawaii.) While a downtown audience open to an experimental musical might have been better acquainted with Philippine politics, Byrne says, “Broadway audiences are a little more focused on storytelling. They want to connect all the dots.”
Most of that work fell on director Alex Timbers and choreographer Annie-B Parson, who had to recalibrate what she calls the “dramatic irony” of the songs: “One of the things I believe in about this show, aesthetically, is the combination of lightness in form and depth and seriousness of subject matter.” Parson credits their costume designer, Clint Ramos, and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, two Filipinos who joined the producing team, with helping the cast and crew better understand the nuances of the material. “It’s not necessarily textual but in the way things are played and placed,” she says. “The tone of the material has changed, and it’s much more embodied, serious, sober, intense; its colors are darker and richer and more saturated in the muscularity of the body.”
For Timbers, who won a Tony for his direction of Moulin Rouge!, it was a matter of sharpening their critique of the Marcoses through the show’s use of projections. “We’ve always had projections that speak to their graft and corruption,” he says, “but we’ve doubled down on statistics and numbers that show, for example, the GDP of the country at a time when Imelda was building these monumental structures, or hitting you with the significance of the 3,200 people that died—the number that were tortured or imprisoned as Marcos eradicated the Supreme Court and Congress. The wash of history cascaded over us at the Public, but we’re now following it more closely, beat by beat.”
But there was more work to be done, especially with the cast, which, unlike in its previous runs or in any company in Broadway history, is composed entirely of Filipino performers. Under Vargas and Ramos’s guidance, the company underwent a two-day intensive workshop where the Filipino producers explained the story behind each song. The production team also assembled a database of books, documentaries, archival footage, and other sources for the cast to study. “Everything we knew had been through our own research,” Parson says, “but this changed the soil of the piece.” Ricamora, who reprises his role as the slain politico (and Imelda’s onetime boyfriend) Ninoy Aquino, appreciated the opportunity to spend “days on days going through archival footage and writings to deepen our understanding. These dramaturgy sessions that we’ve had have been invaluable; it’s a different feeling when you’re doing it as a group and having conversations about how learning this history is personally affecting you.”
Through those sessions, it emerged that much of the cast had not been fully aware of their homeland’s history. “Overwhelmingly, the same response was that people, after they emigrated, didn’t want to talk about the events that happened in the Philippines, especially the unpleasant things,” says Ricamora, whose father left the country at 10 and rarely spoke of his time there. “A lot of times when immigrants come over, they want to assimilate into American culture, so our stories are lost or go untold. I remember being a kid in the ’80s and hearing about the People Power Revolution [which ousted Marcos], but I just thought it was this big parade on TV. I didn’t know they were overthrowing a dictator.” Leading up to opening night, he says he’s struggled with the “dissonance of playing a real-life person who sacrificed so much, in addition to opening a Broadway show around that story. But it’s only because I’m diving deep, because I want to tell this story and I want to do it justice that I have these feelings. It’s almost like survivor guilt.”
Arielle Jacobs, who plays Imelda on Broadway, was mostly in the dark about the Marcos regime until she saw the musical’s original production at the Public Theater. “My family didn’t really talk about it,” she says. “All I knew about Imelda, growing up, was her amazing shoe collection.” The actor, whose family moved to the States a few months before the Marcoses took power, says that her grandfather, upon finding out she’d be playing the role, simply said, “Ah, the dictator.” Being surrounded by an all-Filipino cast, however, has given her “a sense of being completely myself and of knowing there’s no judgment. There are a lot of people who are now connecting to their family members who have lived through these experiences but never wanted to talk about it. It’s starting a lot of healing conversations and giving Filipino communities an outlet to talk about these personal and family histories.”
For Llana, however, the history is inescapable. Born in Manila in 1976, he remembers his family’s distress when his older cousins would fail to come home before curfew. “Living under martial law, the fear that you’d be picked up by the police and questioned was very real and legitimate,” he says. “My grandparents were frustrated that they were tempting fate.” When the actor walked into his audition for the show’s workshops, he announced, “My name’s Jose Llana, I was a martial-law baby, and I’m going to be your new Aquino.” But to his parents’ chagrin at the time, that assertiveness led to his being cast as Ferdinand Marcos. “But from day one of that first workshop, as I got to know David and Alex, they took advantage of my history and asked questions about my family and how they could incorporate more of that lived experience into the story. I told them that the second I felt we were glorifying the Marcoses, I was going to walk away from the project. They understood that and knew that was exactly what they didn’t want to do.”
He’s since taken on among the cast the role of kuya, the Tagalog word for “older brother.” Llana has turned his dressing room into the Two Roses Cafe, named after a line from the show—a communal space and library with an open bar where the cast can learn from the research he’s done since joining the original production. Between walls colored after the Filipino flag, and under neon signs that read “bayanihan” (community) and “laban” (fight, and the People Power Revolution’s rallying cry), cast members gather weekly to celebrate. “It’s a very personal piece for me and one that, even after 12 years, continues to let my family—and the show’s extended family—talk about these experiences,” he says. “It’s all been very cathartic.”