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    PlayStation and BTS Help Lea Salonga Clear Her Head

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    The “Here Lies Love” actress finds inspiration in Alex Newell’s “Shucked” performance and a good night’s sleep in the sounds of “Forensic Files.”Lea Salonga was feeling under the weather earlier this month.“I had to miss shows, which is unfortunate,” she said before one of her final performances in the Broadway disco musical “Here Lies Love.” “But I was still able to stand over a stove and cook this soup that had a lot of garlic and a lot of ginger,” she recalled during a phone interview from her Manhattan home. “It’s called tinola, which is a Filipino chicken soup. It’s what would be cooked every time I was sick at home.”That connection to the Philippines — where Salonga was born and raised — is one she also feels with “Here Lies Love,” which recounts the rise and fall of the country’s ousted leader and first lady, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.“Normally, if I’m watching a theater piece, I could just feel whatever feelings there are, or that the show wants me to feel,” said Salonga, 52, who on Saturday finishes her guest run as Aurora Aquino, the mother of Benigno Aquino Jr., Ferdinand’s political rival. “But with something like this, where there is actual history of my country entwined in the story, my brain didn’t know what to do.”Though Salonga has had a long and distinguished Broadway career, winning a Tony Award in 1991 for her performance in “Miss Saigon” as the doomed Vietnamese mother Kim, “Here Lies Love” is the first time she has played a Filipino onstage and the first time she has served as a producer.Salonga, who next heads to London to begin rehearsals for the West End musical revue “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends,” discussed 10 of her cultural essentials, including her surprise love affair with BTS and how Alex Newell turned her world upside down in “Shucked.” These are edited excerpts.1PlayStation 5It’s a great way for me to escape after a show, to kind of cleanse my mind, especially if I’m doing a show that’s exhausting mentally and emotionally. Lately I’ve been playing Horizon Forbidden West; I still have to finish the downloadable content.2BTSAbout six months into the pandemic, I saw “Dynamite.” I can’t remember how I stumbled onto it, but I couldn’t move and I was like, “I have to finish this now.” The dancing and the synchronization and the charm — obviously, they’re beautiful people. It was a great way to find joy and something to look forward to when I woke up for the day in the midst of the world falling apart.3Leche FlanWhen I was growing up in the Philippines, my grandma would make leche flan, which was always so creamy and so delicious. So over the pandemic, when I was living in the Philippines, I learned how to make it. I would send samples of it over to my mother’s house to taste-test, and she would say, “No, that’s too sweet, can you bring down the sugar content?” When I finally got it right, I had to make sure I had written the recipe down!4Essential OilsThey help make me feel relaxed and grounded. You can choose different ones depending on what you feel you need — sometimes I need a little respiratory help, so there are certain oils I’ll either diffuse or massage or rub onto my body, which calm my mind. I gifted everyone in the company of “Here Lies Love” with a little vial of something to remind everyone to just breathe.5Cute PajamasSometimes I don’t really want to dress in a pair of jeans and a shirt to go down and pick something up from the communal pantry in a hotel. If I’m wearing cute pajamas, I can throw on a hoodie or a jacket, and I’ll still look presentable. My cousin gifted me “Family Guy” pajamas — a Stewie T-shirt and matching pants.6Portable PeripheralsI bring a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse to use when I’m traveling, which make it much easier to type. Because I text bilingually sometimes, a voice memo is not able to grab everything.7Over-the-Ear HeadphonesAs much as I love the portability of my earbuds, my ears tend to get irritated after lengthy use. I have the Apple AirPods Max in light green, which are over-the-ear, Bluetooth-enabled and comfortable. I like that there’s a button you can just push so you can hear what’s going on around you.8‘Forensic Files’I find things like chromatography and DNA analysis fascinating. But also, Peter Thomas’s voice has lulled me to sleep more times than I can count.9‘Steven Universe’I just adore it for its themes of queer acceptance and girl power. Not to mention the number of musical theater folks that voice characters on it, including Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole.10Alex Newell in ‘Shucked’Dear God, Alex Newell is every single thing. That is a cultural reset to see what it’s like when this superstar stops the show and commands a standing ovation in the middle of the first half. But it’s Alex Newell — of course the show’s going to stop! More

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      Everybody Dance Now! ‘Here Lies Love’ Dictates Your Moves.

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      Engaging viewers’ bodies is central to this Broadway musical, a rare production that sets its audience in motion on the dance floor.Like many Broadway musicals, “Here Lies Love” involves a lot of dancing. Notably less common: how much moving is done by the audience.It isn’t unheard-of for a musical to tell the story of a dictator’s wife, but this one, with songs by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, is distinctly focused on its subject’s dancing habits. Imelda Marcos — wife of Ferdinand Marcos, the longtime president of the Philippines — was fond of discothèques. Accordingly, the Broadway Theater has been half-converted into a club on the model of Studio 54. There is a giant disco ball and a D.J., and the orchestra seats have been stripped out so that up to 300 members of the audience can experience the 90-minute show while crowded on a dance floor.As at a disco, those standing can dance as they like. But they are also herded by wranglers in magenta jumpsuits with light-up wands like the ones used to direct taxiing airplanes. Wheeled platforms and runways are regularly rearranged around the floor area, displacing audience members. One cruciform platform is aptly called the Blender. It churns the crowd like batter.The rest of the audience is seated, above the dance floor and back into the depths of the mezzanine. But these viewers move, too, encouraged by the D.J. to join the standing folks in a simple line dance, picking up the moves from cast members spread throughout the theater on more platforms and catwalks. A lot of the story action happens up there, too.“The engagement of the audience’s body is highly unusual,” Annie-B Parson, the show’s choreographer, said. “And when you engage the body, you also engage the mind and the heart.”The choreographer Annie-B Parson: “The engagement of the audience’s body is highly unusual. And when you engage the body, you also engage the mind and the heart.”Naima Green for The New York Times“Here Lies Love” has developed over more than a decade in various incarnations, but dance and audience motion have been at the center of the conception from the start, said Alex Timbers, the director: “We didn’t want it to be interactive, with people pulled up onstage and feeling embarrassed. We wanted the audience to be moving as a unit so no one feels singled out.”The idea is to cast the audience in the drama as extras, Timbers said. They aren’t just dancers at the club. They are guests at the Marcos’s wedding; the public at political rallies and election parties; witnesses to the assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr., the Marcos’s rival; participants in the People Power Revolution that overthrew the dictator in 1986.“Your journey changes, just like America’s relationship with the Philippines,” Timbers said. “After Aquino’s assassination, you feel a little complicit in having danced at Imelda’s wedding.”Similarly, the D.J. telling everyone what to do is somewhat dictatorial. When Marcos institutes martial law, no audience member “is getting tortured or anything,” Timbers said, “but there is a metaphor at play physically.”“You watch the audience applaud,” Parson said, “and you watch them wonder why they’re applauding. It’s pretty Brechtian.”Development of the show has been a trial-and-error experiment in how to get audiences to move as the creative team wants. “You don’t have the same audience every night,” Timbers said, “so you’re looking at trends, at human nature.”Elaborate charts delineate how the wranglers can redistribute the crowd effectively and safely without being distracting. And since the people in the mezzanine face in one direction while those on the floor face in several, directing everyone to “step to the right” in a line dance isn’t a simple matter. (Well-placed performers and video screens help.)Parson, who has worked with Byrne on concerts tours and on his recent Broadway show, “American Utopia,” comes from the world of postmodern dance. She said that while Timbers “has a beautiful sense of the body and space,” he and she had opposing, if complementary, attitudes about the fact that no audience member of “Here Lies Love” could see everything.The director of “Here Lies Love,” Alex Timbers, said the idea was to cast the audience in the drama as extras.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“Alex worked really hard to share all the story material with everyone in the theater,” she said, whereas she was thinking about the composer John Cage’s philosophical idea that every seat in the house is perfect. “It becomes about perception. I love the experience of watching someone watch things that I might not be seeing. You feel things in your body that you may not see.”It’s a question of perspective, and not the only one. Many reviews of “Here Lies Love” and public objections to the show have focused on how the glamour and play of the club atmosphere rub against the show’s critique of the Marcoses.Parson said the context of disco — “an ecstatic dance form that tips quickly into despair” — is intentionally ambiguous. “Dancing is relative. You can use it for ill or for the greater good.”Imelda’s use of dance, what became known as her handbag diplomacy, “was embodied statesmanship,” Parson said. “She didn’t put a table between her and Nixon or Castro. She asked them to dance. She wasn’t a great dancer but that gave her a lot of power.”At one point, cast members act this out, wearing masks of famous political leaders. At other points, the choreography borrows a few of Imelda’s signature moves: circling her eye with two fingers, tapping the tops of her butterfly sleeves.The line dance, Parson said, was designed to be “fun and easy, something you could do in a chair if space was tight.” (“The Philippines have a really muscular tradition of line dancing,” she added, noting that the line dancing performed by the all-Filipino cast at parties is much more intricate.)Much of the choreography for the cast is more complicated, but mostly in tone, Parson said. In the title song, for example, Imelda tells the audience to remember her for love. “But let’s talk about the families she destroyed,” Parson said. “It’s a beautiful song, but it is ironic, so that’s how I choreographed it, with swinging umbrellas and sternum to the ceiling. You can’t take it straight.”Timothy Matthew Flores, who plays Aquino’s son along with other ensemble roles, said the detail of Parson’s choreography — “every single movement has a meaning” — made it more difficult than flashier and harder-hitting dance he’s done before. And running all around the large theater is “90 minutes of cardio.”But getting the audience out of their seats and dancing? That’s just fun, Flores said. “They start off shy and then they end up having a really good time. You can see them thinking, ‘Wow, this is not like any other Broadway show.’” More

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      Review: Dancing With Dictators in David Byrne’s ‘Here Lies Love’

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      A new Broadway musical tells the disturbing story of Imelda Marcos by putting her, and the audience, in a disco.It’s the applause — including my own — I find troubling.Not that there isn’t plenty to praise in “Here Lies Love,” the immersive disco-bio-musical about Imelda Marcos that opened on Thursday at the Broadway Theater. The infernally catchy songs by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, performed by a tireless and inspired all-Filipino cast, will have you clapping whether you want to or not. Their chunky beats, abetted by insistent dance motivators, may even prompt you to bop at your seat — if you have one.Because the real star of this show is the astonishing architectural transformation of the theater itself, by the set designer David Korins. Opened in 1924 as a movie palace, more lately the home of “King Kong” and “West Side Story,” the Broadway has now been substantially gutted, its nearly 1,800 seats reduced to about 800, with standing room for another 300 in the former orchestra section and a 42-inch disco ball dead center.The folks upstairs, if not the mostly younger standees below, will surely recognize the visual reference to Studio 54, the celebrity nightclub where Marcos, the first lady of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986, danced away the last decade of her reign while impoverishing her people. That she would probably adore the over-emphatic atmosphere of “Here Lies Love” — with its lurid lighting by Justin Townsend, skittering projections by Peter Nigrini and earsplitting sound by M.L. Dogg and Cody Spencer — is, however, equivocal praise.For here we are, at the place where irony and meta-messaging form a theatrical-historical knot that can’t be picked apart. Which is why, as you clap, you should probably wonder what for.Is it for Imelda (Arielle Jacobs), the beauty queen who rose from “hand-me-downs and scraps” to become the fashion-plate wife of the Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos? Is it for the ruthless Ferdinand himself (Jose Llana)? (His landslide election in 1965 elicited some Pavlovian cheers the night I saw the show.) Or is it for Ninoy Aquino (Conrad Ricamora), the opposition leader who was Imelda’s former beau? (Having spurned her in their youth, he was later assassinated by forces thought to be close to Ferdinand’s regime.) All get equivalent star treatment here.Seating at the Broadway Theater was reduced from 1,800 to about 800, with standing room for another 300, to create a Studio 54-like atmosphere, complete with a 42-inch disco ball in the center of the house.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe confusion of sympathies is just where Byrne and the director Alex Timbers want us. Avoiding the near-hagiography of “Evita” and yet unwilling to bank a commercial production on a totally hateful character, they aim for a middle ground that doesn’t exist, yet mostly hit it anyway. Their Imelda is a victim of poverty and mistreatment, dim despite her cunning and innocent by reason of inanity. When Filipinos fully turn against her during the People Power revolution of 1986, she is more mystified than crushed. “Why don’t you love me?” she sings.We know the answer: The string of her outrages, even apart from her husband’s, seems literally endless. She did not retire from public office until 2019, and her son, Bongbong, is now president.But “Here Lies Love” — the title taken from an epitaph she proposed for herself — tempers the atrocities with the pleasure of its songs. Jacobs, a Broadway Jasmine in “Aladdin,” gets the catchiest ones, and delivers them well, if without the emotional nuance Ruthie Ann Miles brought to the role a decade earlier when the show had a developmental run at the Public Theater.To be fair, the material steers as far from emotion as possible, no matter how many times the word “love” is used. Byrne’s characteristic idiom — which feeds disco, folk and pop through an art rock filter — is too cool for that, and his lyrics, perhaps because they are based on public utterances of the real-life figures, reject psychology almost entirely. They are often thus too banal to serve the usual purpose of songs in musicals; instead of developing character internally they suggest it externally with a torrent of catchphrases. “It takes a woman to do a man’s job,” Imelda sings blankly upon assuming power from the sickly Ferdinand.Without a vivid inner life to inflect such clichés, it’s hard to wring anything from them except a cringe. The beamish Ricamora and the scowling Llana, returning from the earlier production, get around the problem with their charisma, and Lea Salonga, in the cameo role of Aquino’s mother, turns “Just Ask the Flowers,” sung at Ninoy’s funeral, into a powerful if perplexing anthem through sheer vocal bravura.Conrad Ricamora, center, as Ninoy Aquino, performing on an array of moving platforms that transport the action to various parts of the theater while sweeping the audience into new configurations.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, a musical not centered on feelings is a strange thing. Where another show might attempt to squeeze the relationship between Imelda and Ninoy for drama, it is merely a lump of undigested fact here. And Imelda’s infamous collection of state-financed shoes goes unmentioned, which is like mounting “Evita” without the Dior dress.To compensate, or double down, Timbers emphasizes pure pageantry in his staging. The actors often perform on an array of moving platforms that transport the action to various parts of the theater while incidentally sweeping the standees into new configurations. (Guides in pink jumpsuits with airport-style light wands keep them from getting mowed down.) You are left to draw your own conclusions about how crowds, whether in Manila or Manhattan, respond to being pushed around for too long and for apparently arbitrary reasons. There’s a reason affiliations and uprisings are often called movements.No surprise then that the most expressive element in “Here Lies Love” (along with Clint Ramos’s costumes, which also move beautifully) is the choreography by Annie-B Parson. Based on small hand gestures and large traffic patterns, it suggests a fuller spectrum of human engagement than the otherwise narrowly focused and sometimes mechanical production achieves.Is it wrong to seek that engagement more fully? (Or as Imelda sings: “Is it a sin to love too much?”) For most of its 90 intermission-less minutes, “Here Lies Love” finesses the question, preferring to be treated as anything — an art object, a dance party — besides what it is. In that way, it recalls Byrne’s Broadway concert “American Utopia,” on which Timbers and Parson also collaborated. But that show, which had no story, needed only to be sleek and enjoyable to score its points.“Here Lies Love” bets that glamour can make up for narrative — or, rather, that in a show about the dangers of political demagogy, glamour itself is the narrative. It’s a case of form follows function into the fire. We are drawn to cultural and political excitement in much the same, often dangerous way.Perhaps the irony of making a musical about that is more viscerally appreciable down on the dance floor. It was for me at the Public, where almost everyone had to stand and be part of the story, not observers of it. (There were only 42 seats.) And perhaps, 10 years later, with our own politics looking a lot more like the Marcoses’, no one can afford to keep a distance.In any case, on Broadway, it’s not until the gorgeous last song, “God Draws Straight,” that the material matches the movement in a way that reaches the balcony. Led by Moses Villarama, and based on comments by eyewitnesses to the peaceful 1986 revolution, it acknowledges the moral superiority of its real heroes — the Philippine people — in the only way a musical can: by giving it beautiful voice. Finally, it’s OK to applaud.Here Lies LoveAt the Broadway Theater, Manhattan; herelieslovebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Here Lies Love’ Pairs Disco With a Dictator. It’s a Controversial Choice.

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      The musical, the brainchild of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, dramatizes — and, some say, sanitizes — the life of the former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos.The Broadway musical “Here Lies Love” is a rollicking karaoke dance party with an immersive staging and, for the first time in Broadway history, organizers say, an all-Filipino cast.It’s a good time — until it’s not.At its center is the brutal regime of Ferdinand (played by Jose Llana) and Imelda Marcos (Arielle Jacobs), the former president and first lady of the Philippines who committed countless human rights abuses and violent crimes during his 21-year reign from 1965 to 1986.David Byrne, who wrote the music and lyrics for the show with the electronic dance musician Fatboy Slim, has said the musical, which focuses on the life of Imelda Marcos, interpolates karaoke as a means of replicating for audiences how it felt for Filipinos who lived through the Marcos regime.But, some argue, telling the story of the corrupt Marcos regime through disco does not work when the audience lacks the necessary context. The production, opening July 20, has faced accusations that it trivializes the suffering of thousands of Filipinos.Here’s what to know about Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos, the People Power Revolution of 1986 and the controversies the show has faced.Who was Ferdinand Marcos?Ferdinand Marcos, the longest-serving president of the Philippines, was a dictator who placed the country under martial law from 1972 until 1981. In 1983 the opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr. (played by Conrad Ricamora) was assassinated at the airport as he was returning from exile; an investigatory panel concluded that a military plot was responsible. The assassination led to a series of events that culminated with Aquino’s widow, Corazon, becoming president in 1986.With the election of Aquino, Marcos fled the Philippines for Hawaii, where he died in 1989 without ever facing trial in the United States on criminal charges that he plundered the Philippine Treasury of more than $100 million. (However, the following decade a jury in Hawaii awarded damages of almost $2 billion against his estate for the killings and tortures of almost 10,000 Filipinos. Collecting on that judgment has been difficult though, and despite ongoing efforts, victims have seen only a fraction of that amount.)Who is Imelda Marcos?Imelda Marcos, who married Ferdinand in 1954, became the face of the regime’s enormous wealth. A former teenage beauty queen known for her love of nightlife and disco music, she and her family raided government coffers to finance a lavish lifestyle while millions of Filipinos lived in poverty.A Philippine court convicted her on corruption charges in 2018 for creating private foundations to hide her wealth, but she appealed the case and is unlikely to see jail time because of her age. She is now 94.What was the People Power Revolution?The Marcos era ended in February 1986 after a series of nonviolent street marches. The People Power Revolution, with more than two million Filipinos participating, condemned the regime’s human rights violations and electoral fraud. The demonstrations ended with Ferdinand Marcos’s departure.Why has the show been controversial?A number of Filipinos have objected to what they argue is the show’s trivialization of the Marcos’s crimes and sympathy toward Imelda Marcos. The actress Sara Porkalob, who recently appeared on Broadway in “1776,” wrote in 2017 that the musical, then playing at the Seattle Repertory Theater, one of the show’s several regional and Off Broadway engagements since its premiere at New York’s Public Theater in 2013, “paints a glossy veneer over the Philippines’ national trauma and America’s role in it.”Those objections have become particularly salient for many now; Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was elected president of the Philippines last year.“David Byrne’s attempt to humanize Imelda Marcos insults the impoverished people she and her family stole from,” Ruben Carranza, a former government lawyer who prosecuted Imelda Marcos’s hidden wealth cases, wrote in a recent email. “And because it is playing at a time when the Marcoses have lied their way back to power, ‘Here Lies Love’ will only reinforce those lies and serve, intentionally or not, the larger Marcos agenda of denying truth and revising the history of their dictatorship.”Others, however, have praised the show’s approach, contending that it “mirrors Filipino complicity and American blindness through its disco-controlled experiment on its audience,” as the Filipino novelist Gina Apostol wrote in 2014 after seeing the show Off Broadway at the Public Theater.How has the production responded?In a statement released earlier this year after criticism resurfaced following the announcement of the Broadway transfer, producers wrote that “Here Lies Love” is “an anti-Marcos show” intended to combat disinformation with “a creative way of re-information.” The show has also hired a Filipino American actress, Giselle Töngi, known as G, as a cultural and community liaison.Why did Broadway musicians object to the show?Though producers have argued that using recorded instrumental tracks instead of a live band is central to the storytelling, a labor union representing musicians objected in May, arguing that its contract for the theater requires musicians to be used for musicals. In June they reached a compromise: The musical would employ 12 live musicians.What has Imelda Marcos said about the show?In 2010, after listening to part of Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s original concept album for the show at a mall food court in the Philippines during her campaign for the country’s House of Representatives, she told The New York Times reporter Norimitsu Onishi, “I’m flattered; I can’t believe it!”The show takes its title from the three-word phrase she has said she would like inscribed on her tombstone. More

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      For Filipino Audiences, ‘Here Lies Love’ Offers Emotional Rip Currents

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      The disco balls were spinning, the club music was pulsing, and on the dance floor, several Filipino audience members were near tears.It was a Saturday night, and at the Broadway Theater, “Here Lies Love,” the David Byrne-Fatboy Slim musical about the rise and fall of Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos, the former first couple of the Philippines, was preparing for its Broadway opening on July 20. In previews, it has drawn a growing stream of Filipino American theatergoers, reeled in by the chance to see their national — and in some cases, their family — history told onstage, close enough for them to literally touch.“I’ve never been in a play where I have a personal connection” to the story, said Earl Delfin, a 35-year-old Manhattanite. “I felt represented on a New York stage for the first time.”He got emotional in the opening scenes, he added. “And of course I danced.”Arielle Jacobs as Imelda Marcos, whose journey from beauty pageant contestant to wife of a despot is the focus of the show.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“Here Lies Love,” which opened to critical raves and sold-out crowds at the Public Theater downtown in 2013, arrives on Broadway after sojourns in London and Seattle, each time expanding its house and fine tuning its immersive staging. But only now has it added a fully Filipino cast — the first-ever on Broadway, organizers say. Also new are a cadre of Filipino producers, including the Tony winner Lea Salonga, the Pulitzer-winning writer Jose Antonio Vargas, the comedian Jo Koy and the Grammy-winning musician H.E.R., along with investors from Manila.“It only felt responsible, to fully engage with the motherland,” said the costume designer and creative consultant Clint Ramos, a native of Cebu, Philippines, who has worked on the show since its inception. He is now also a producer.“Having cultural capital from the motherland, but also financial capital from the motherland, it feels like the authorship and ownership of the show are holding hands very tightly. And that’s a great feeling,” he said.The narrative framework of the show has not changed: It still harnesses the gloss of a discothèque — as first lady, Imelda was a denizen of Studio 54 — to reflect the Marcoses’ dizzying rise to power, and the glittery allure of privilege and wealth that led the couple to spend their nation into massive debt, to live lavishly as their constituents suffered.The production has a cultural and community liaison who plans Filipino community events; even on regular nights, the show attracts attendees who had direct dealings with the Marcos and Aquino clans, organizers said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesJustin J Wee for The New York TimesJustin J Wee for The New York TimesArielle Jacobs, a new addition to the cast, plays Imelda, whose journey from naïve beauty pageant contestant to sentimental megalomaniac — “Why Don’t You Love Me?” goes a signature song — is the focus of the story. Jose Llana reprises Ferdinand from the Public; his path from charismatic leader to presidential despot is shorter. “If they want to boo Marcos,” Llana said of audiences, “then I think I did my job right.”There is no book; the action is driven by Byrne’s soaring tunes (with beats by Fatboy Slim) and by the exuberant choreography of Annie-B Parson, Byrne’s frequent collaborator. A D.J. (Moses Villarama) acts as an emcee.Every day, Ramos said, as the creative team worked out the massive lighting rigs and costume transitions, they also asked the question: “Are we looking at history correctly here?”The challenge — engineered by Byrne, who hoped that the nightlife setting would give audiences a taste of the limitlessness of power — is formidable. “How do you combine joy with tragedy?” said Alex Timbers, the director, in a joint interview with Ramos.In place of a stage, the Broadway Theater was redesigned to create a dance club. Moving platforms carry the performers, with standing theatergoers surrounding them on the floor; catwalks bring the actors within arms reach for those seated above. The choreography encourages audience members to interact with the cast, hip-swiveling beside them in line dances, and playing the part of the faithful at political rallies — moments of civilian joy and swept-along fellowship that are broadcast on giant screens around the space, alongside darker, real news footage and transcripts.Audience members making the Laban sign, a Filipino hand gesture popularized by Ninoy Aquino, Ferdinand Marcos’s chief political rival.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesElizer Caballero, a fan who came from San Francisco, was practically vibrating with delight as he sang and bopped along to the score. The experience of being surrounded by the actors as they told this native story was almost surreal — he felt like part of the show — “but it’s also very poignant,” he said. “Especially for a Filipino American, it’s best to be on the floor. It adds more depth.”An untranslated moment when Imelda curses at Ferdinand in Tagalog has gotten a more consistent laugh on Broadway than it ever did downtown, cast members said. (The production has a cultural and community liaison, Giselle Töngi, who plans Filipino community events; even on regular nights, it attracted attendees who had direct dealings with the Marcos and Aquino clans, organizers said.)Salonga, the first Asian woman to win a Tony (in 1991, for “Miss Saigon”) is stepping in as Aurora Aquino, the mother of Benigno Aquino Jr., Ferdinand’s chief political rival, in a guest spot this summer. It is the first time in her long career she has played a role written as Filipina.Seeing a production of “Here Lies Love” a few years ago surfaced visceral memories of her childhood in Manila, during the Marcoses’ reign. Performing in it felt overwhelming. “I’m slamming into history,” Salonga said.Researching the part, she spoke to friends in the Aquino family. (Corazon C. Aquino, Benigno’s widow, succeeded Marcos as president.) In rehearsals for her number, she thought, “Oh my gosh, how am I going to keep my emotions from overtaking me as I try to sing the song?” she said in a phone interview. “I had friends texting me, saying, How on earth are you going to keep from crying when you do this?”Attendees of Filipino descent have described experiencing an intense personal connection at seeing their history depicted onstage.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesJustin J Wee for The New York TimesFor second-generation Filipino Americans, whose families prioritized assimilation, learning the story of their homeland has been a different kind of revelation. “Growing up, the only thing I really knew about Imelda was her shoe collection,” Jacobs said. “Getting in touch with this part of the Filipino culture, and the resilience of the Filipino people — all of that has been an awakening for me.”“Here Lies Love” is arriving on Broadway in a political and social landscape that’s vastly shifted since its premiere in the Obama era. The rapid unraveling of democracy it depicts is close at hand, the world over, Timbers and Ramos noted. Ferdinand’s habit of exaggerating or outright fabricating his successes is part of the autocrat playbook. Even his recorded dalliances with a starlet have a familiar ring. Ferdinand and Imelda’s son, known as Bongbong, is currently president of the Philippines. (After her husband’s death in 1989, Imelda, now 94, returned to politics and served three terms as a congresswoman.)Developing the project with Byrne, the protean former Talking Head, the creative team took pains not to glamorize Ferdinand, who imposed martial law from 1972 to 1981, and whose regime carried out mass arrests and silenced critics. The assassination of Aquino, at the airport when he returned from exile in the U.S. in 1983, served as a turning point to galvanize opposition against the Marcoses, and is an emotional rip current in “Here Lies Love.”In previews, it has drawn a growing stream of Filipino American theatergoers.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesConrad Ricamora, who has played the boyish Aquino (known as Ninoy) in three of the four productions, understood his legacy quickly. On Broadway, audiences make the Laban sign — a hand gesture like an inverted L; the word means “fight” — that Ninoy popularized. “If you look at people who do heroic things throughout history, they are only able to do them because they are deeply in touch with their humanity and the humanity of others,” Ricamora said.The show has still been criticized for putting a couple known for their ruthless corruption in the spotlight, and for minimizing Imelda’s political prowess. (A website aims to contextualize the country’s history.) In a statement, the producers said their new, binational group came together “in a time of necessary and welcome assessment of who tells what stories,” and that having people with lived experiences of this era further imbued the show “with authenticity.”For the nearly two dozen cast members — eight of whom are making their Broadway debuts — it is a rare chance to commune, and revisit, together, a past that is hardly in the rearview mirror for some of them.Ramos calls himself “a martial law baby,” raised under Marcos’s most brutal period. He was also there in February 1986, a school kid “on top of a tank,” he said, when the four-day protests known as the People Power Revolution swept the couple out of office, peacefully. “I experienced the whole arc of the regime,” he said. He came to the U.S. in the late ’90s, for grad school.Llana’s family landed in New York in 1979, when he was 3; his parents were student activists who had fled martial law. “Me being a part of this show for the past 10 years has really been cathartic,” he said, “because it wasn’t something necessarily that my parents talked about.”The choreography encourages audience members to interact with the cast, hip-swiveling beside them in line dances, and playing the part of the faithful at political rallies.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesWhen he first heard about the show, he hoped to play Aquino: “I thought nothing would make my parents prouder.” Instead he was asked to read for Ferdinand. It was, he said, an awkward conversation with his family when he got the part, and he made it known to the creative team that he would walk away if the production flattered a dictator.Still, he said, as an actor he needs to find the humanity in his characters. “And I think maybe that’s where sometimes people start criticizing us, is that we’re humanizing them. But you have to humanize people if you want to hold them accountable.”Llana’s castmates call him “kuya,” which means older brother or older male cousin in Tagalog — a term of endearment. For him, even after so many years with the show, the addition of Filipino producers was deeply meaningful. “It made me feel safe,” he said, “knowing that the Filipinos were in charge, that we could just do our jobs” as artists.Like Salonga, he has played a variety of ethnicities, just about none of them Filipino.“I feel like I owe all of those ethnicities an apology — like, I’m sorry I got cast,” Salonga said. “But things were very different at the time.”Even putting a complex, layered story like this on Broadway — staged like a dance party, no less — could serve as inspiration and empowerment, she hoped. “I want to see other communities of color be able to look at ‘Here Lies Love’ and go, ‘We can do that. We have these stories that we are able to tell. We are going to be able to do this.’” More

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      David Byrne’s ‘Here Lies Love’ Reaches Deal With Broadway Musicians

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      After the musicians’ union raised objections to the show’s plans to use recorded music instead of a live band, the show agreed to use 12 musicians.“Here Lies Love,” the new David Byrne musical scheduled to start previews on Broadway next week, has bowed to objections by a labor union and agreed that 12 musicians will be part of the production.The producers of the musical, which is a dance-club-like show about Imelda Marcos, and the union, Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, announced the agreement late Friday afternoon.“On behalf of our entire cast, company and creative team, we have reached an agreement with Musicians Union Local 802, per the collective bargaining agreement,” the producers of the musical said in a statement. “We look forward to welcoming audiences to experience the revolutionary musical experience that is ‘Here Lies Love’ at the Broadway Theater beginning on Saturday, June 17.”The union issued a similarly terse, but slightly more detailed, statement, saying, “After negotiation, we have reached an agreement that will bring live music to ‘Here Lies Love’ with the inclusion of 12 musicians to the show. Broadway is a very special place with the best musicians and performances in the world, and we are glad this agreement honors that tradition.”Eric Koch, a communications consultant for the union, said three of the company’s actors would be counted among the 12 musicians.Asked about that, the producers responded: “‘Here Lies Love’ has always had three actor-musicians and a musical director in every production. The show’s integrity and the musical concept remains the same.”“Here Lies Love” is being led by a group of producers, including Patrick Catullo, Hal Luftig, Kevin Connor, Jose Antonio Vargas, Diana DiMenna and Clint Ramos. The show is one of the larger productions opening on Broadway this summer, with a big budget — it is being capitalized for up to $22 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission — and plans to redo the Broadway Theater so that the production can be staged in an immersive fashion, with much of the audience on a dance floor surrounded by the action.“Here Lies Love,” about Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, was written by Byrne and Fatboy Slim. It has been around for more than 15 years, and has been praised by critics and popular with audiences. It was presented as a song cycle at Carnegie Hall in 2007, and there were productions in 2012 at Mass MoCA, an art museum in the Berkshires; in 2013 at the Public Theater in New York; in 2014 at London’s National Theater and back at the Public for a second engagement; and in 2017 at the Seattle Repertory Theater.The production has in the past used recorded music, which the show said was meant to create a karaoke-like atmosphere, but as the Broadway opening neared, the labor union objected, saying its contract with the Broadway League requires the use of live musicians. The union had threatened to protest this weekend’s Tony Awards and the show’s upcoming previews; on Friday, the two sides settled the dispute. More

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      Broadway Musicians Object to David Byrne’s ‘Here Lies Love’

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      The show plans to use recorded music instead of a live band, but a labor union says its contract for the theater requires musicians for musicals.A labor union representing musicians is challenging David Byrne’s next Broadway show, “Here Lies Love,” saying it opposes plans to stage the production with recorded instrumental tracks instead of a live band.The musical — an immersive, dance-driven spectacle about Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines — is scheduled to start previews June 17 and to open July 20 at the Broadway Theater. Byrne co-wrote the music with Fatboy Slim.The musical has previously been staged Off Broadway, in London and in Seattle, each time with a singing cast accompanied by recorded music. There are a few moments in which actors have instruments as part of the action being depicted, but there are no full-time instrumentalists.“Since ‘Here Lies Love’ was first conceived 17 years ago, every production has been performed to prerecorded track; this is part of the karaoke genre inherent to the musical and the production concept,” the production’s spokesman, Adrian Bryan-Brown, said in a statement on Tuesday. “The music for ‘Here Lies Love’ was inspired by the phenomena of ‘track acts,’ which allowed club audiences to keep dancing, much like this production aims to do.”But Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians says its contract with the Broadway League requires the use of 19 musicians for musicals at the Broadway Theater. (The number of musicians required under the contract varies based on theater size.)The union says it is seeking to preserve jobs for musicians and quality for theater lovers.“We’re not going to stand by and let this happen,” said Tino Gagliardi, the local’s president and executive director. “It’s not fair to the public.”Since February, the producing team of “Here Lies Love,” led by Hal Luftig, has been seeking to have the show declared a “special situation,” which is a category in the labor agreement that allows for the employment of fewer musicians. The request is to be assessed by a panel that includes neutral observers as well as representatives of the Broadway League and the musicians’ union; it is not clear how long that process will take, and the ruling can be appealed to arbitration.The League did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday, but Bryan-Brown said, “This process is ongoing and may ultimately culminate in a final and binding arbitration decision, but until that time, we will continue to work in good faith with the union to move through the steps of the contractual process.”There have been multiple Broadway shows staged with reduced orchestra sizes over the years, but it is rare to have a musical without an orchestra at all. The best-known example was “Contact,” a dance show produced by the nonprofit Lincoln Center Theater that won the 2000 Tony Award for best musical. In 2011, the union objected to a reduced-size orchestra, along with recorded music, for the Broadway production of “Priscilla Queen of the Desert.” More recently, “The Little Prince” was staged at the Broadway Theater with music sung to recorded tracks; that show was not Tony-eligible and had a short run, so the union did not object.The musicians say they are disappointed that the request is coming from a show associated with Byrne, whom they revere. Byrne’s last Broadway production, “American Utopia,” showcased musicians, with the band onstage playing instruments and dancing with the star.“I was really excited that David Byrne was bringing something else to Broadway,” said Ray Cetta, a bass player and union member who has occasionally played in the band for “Chicago.” “The current situation is very surprising and disheartening. Any musician would want to work with David Byrne and bring his music to life.” More

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      When ‘A Little Touch of Star Quality’ Is a Little Too Much

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      In upcoming musical revivals, world leaders both real (Imelda Marcos, Eva Perón) and folkloric (King Arthur) get an image makeover they may not deserve.Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes?I don’t mean mere antiheroes like Billy Bigelow, the “Carousel” carnival barker who sings gloriously about love yet hits his wife. Or Joey Evans, that lowlife “pal,” whose bed-hopping grift is set to a sparkling Rodgers and Hart score. Or even Evan Hansen, lying his way to love as he catches your heart with the catch in his throat.They’re all pikers, their damage largely domestic.Sweeney Todd, the liberally neck-slashing barber, is more like it. Though most of Fleet Street has been minced by the time the curtain falls on the musical named for him, he gets some of Stephen Sondheim’s most gorgeous arias, including the sinuous “My Friends” (crooned to his razors) and the erotic “Pretty Women” (whispered in the ear of the judge he’s about to dispatch). That a penny dreadful character originally meant just to shock and sicken becomes instead a pitiable victim is a testament to the power of music to make bad guys, if not good, compelling.Still, in “Sweeney Todd,” which opens next month in a Broadway revival starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford, the terror remains local because the barber has no leverage. In three other upcoming musical revivals — “Evita,” “Camelot” and “Here Lies Love” — the damage is done by people with real power. Their harm is political, epochal, even as the songs they sing, encouraging empathy that may not otherwise be earned, invite us to give them a pass.Michael Cerveris, center, as the demon barber of Fleet Street, and Patti LuPone as Mrs. Lovett, second from left, in a 2005 production of “Sweeney Todd” at the Eugene O’Neill Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesExploring the humanity in flawed characters was the premise of many Golden Age musicals, which leaves them open to challenge today. “Evita” is an extreme case. Tim Rice’s book and lyrics try to keep the sins of Eva Perón, the second wife of the Argentine strongman Juan, at an ironic remove, lest the show seem to endorse her fascist tendencies and demagogic élan. The words make plain, just shy of celebrating, her manipulative genius.But Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music works at cross purposes to that distancing effort. Though famously difficult to sing, the difficulty is exciting; it’s impossible not to be thrilled when a performer nails the treacherous downward arpeggios of “Buenos Aires” or the stratospheric belt of “A New Argentina.” And to the extent new productions mimic the chic of the 1979 Broadway premiere, “Evita” always seems to bank on the same “little touch of star quality” that the real Perón did.Whether that contradiction can be addressed within the confines of the musical as written remains to be seen. Sammi Cannold, whose staging for New York City Center’s 2019 gala provided more context for Perón’s ambition, seems poised to go even further in a production scheduled to run from May 14 through July 16 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. It’s promising that in a TED Talk about “Evita,” Cannold reflects on “the responsibility of the storyteller.”More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.More honored in the breach, that notion is part of what renders many Golden Age musicals so tricky today. Some of their unexamined assumptions — about race and gender and even the primacy of pleasurable song over political impact — have been revised or shot down in the intervening decades.One musical compromised in the process is “Camelot,” a romantic retelling of Arthurian legend that opened on Broadway in 1960. Its book, by Alan Jay Lerner, has always been considered clumsy and overlong; for Bartlett Sher’s Lincoln Center Theater revival, which begins performances on March 9, Aaron Sorkin has rewritten it.Though dialogue in “Camelot” explains why Arthur (Richard Burton in the original 1960 production) orders the execution of Guenevere (Julie Andrews), song makes him sympathetic, our critic writes.Pictorial Press Ltd./AlamyBut the score, with Lerner’s lyrics and Frederick Loewe’s music, was always able to compensate for the book’s shortcomings. Arthur’s utopian dreams were so perfectly captured in the title song that it became an emblem of the Kennedy era. The hauteur of his wife, Guenevere, and the egotism of her lover, Lancelot, were exposed and then exploded in torrents of rapturous balladry that swept away their faults.More recent concerns about the story may be more difficult to dismiss with mere melody. Indeed, melody can aggravate the problem. Though dialogue explains why Arthur behaves as he does — ordering his wife’s execution and destroying his country’s peace — song makes him sympathetic. Especially with a beloved score, the identification between audience and the characters is difficult to sever: We sing the songs in our heads as they sing them aloud.If it took six decades to see why that might be problematic for “Camelot,” just one has sufficed to raise similar questions about “Here Lies Love,” which sets the story of Imelda Marcos to a disco score by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim. A success at the Public Theater in 2013, it is only now transferring to Broadway, where performances are scheduled to begin on June 17.The intervening years have altered the way we look at historical characters onstage, from Alexander Hamilton to Princess Diana. Marcos presents a particular problem, because she’s not yet historical: The country’s first lady from 1965 to 1986, she’s now, at 93, its first mother. (Her son, Ferdinand Jr., known as Bongbong, became president last June.) Whether merely supporting her husband’s dictatorship or more directly influencing and maintaining it, she was part of a regime accused of looting billions from the country’s treasury and eliminating its opponents.In telling the story of Imelda Marcos, a former first lady of the Philippines whose husband’s regime was accused of corruption, “Here Lies Love” takes lyrics from her own speeches and interviews.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNo wonder some Filipinos and Filipino Americans have objected to the way “Here Lies Love,” at least in the version seen at the Public, seems to sympathize with its main character. Sara Porkalob, who recently appeared on Broadway in “1776,” described the musical as painting “a glossy veneer over the Philippines’ national trauma and America’s role in it.”The show’s producers countered that “Here Lies Love” is “an Anti-Marcos show” that aims to fight disinformation with “a creative way of re-information.”But creative to what end? Though most of the show’s lyrics are taken from Marcos’s own speeches and interviews, phrases like “Why don’t you love me?” and “Is it a sin to care?” have a very different effect when merely spoken than when set to singalong melodies and danceable beats. Staging the production in what amounts to a discothèque further complicates the point of view. When song and dance bring so much pleasure, you may miss the atrocities as you’re doing the hustle.Perhaps that’s the point. As the musical has matured, artists have naturally sought to write about people who are more complicated than randy teenagers and frivolous socialites. Yet by applying the powerful tools of the form to darker and more dangerous figures, those figures are literally given greater voice, forcing us to consider the ways in which they are humans even if they may also be monsters.Does that mean whitewashing them? Obviously not; to describe domestic violence, as “Carousel” does, is not to endorse it. And yet seducing us into a kind of emotional complicity with powerful figures, especially real ones like Perón and Marcos, does have its dangers — dangers enhanced by the fundamental amorality of song, no matter what the words say.So when Evita, thrilling her public with diamonds and Dior, sings, “They must have excitement, and so must I,” it’s not that we risk forgiving her. It’s that we risk enjoying too much what we can’t forgive. More

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      ‘Here Lies Love,’ an Imelda Marcos Disco Musical, Will Play Broadway

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      The immersive dance show, with music by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, will arrive this summer after a decade of productions Off Broadway and in London and Seattle.“Here Lies Love,” a wild, immersive, disco-driven dance musical about Imelda Marcos, the extravagant and colorful former first lady of the Philippines, will make its long-anticipated trip to Broadway this summer.The show, with downtown roots and dance-floor audiences, will be an unusual fit for Broadway: Its animating idea has been that both the actors and the audience are on their feet, circling one another as they move throughout the production.A sung-through musical written by the pop musicians David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, “Here Lies Love” began its public life in 2007 as an embryonic multimedia song cycle presented at Carnegie Hall. In 2010, Marcos listened to part of the double album with a New York Times reporter (“I’m flattered; I can’t believe it!” she said).Then came the stage productions: in 2012 at Mass MoCA, an art museum in the Berkshires; in 2013 at the Public Theater in New York; in 2014 at London’s National Theater and back at the Public for a second engagement; and in 2017 at the Seattle Repertory Theater.Along the way, it has been transforming from a happening into a show, or at least learning how to do both by adding more chairs for patrons who like to watch while seated. The upcoming production will be staged at the Broadway Theater, one of the largest venues on Broadway, although a spokeswoman said that audience capacity had yet to be determined.The producers said in a statement that they planned to “transform the venue’s traditional proscenium floor space into a dance club environment, where audiences will stand and move with the actors,” but promised that “a wide variety of standing and seating options will be available.”The production will be directed by Alex Timbers, who has been with the show through its stage journey; the set is designed by David Korins (“Hamilton”), and the choreographer is Annie-B Parson, who also designed the movement for Byrne’s previous Broadway venture, “American Utopia.”Timbers has some experience with unconventional staging experiments on Broadway. In 2014 he directed a musical adaptation of “Rocky” in which some patrons were reseated during the show to make way for a boxing match, and in 2020 he won a Tony Award for directing “Moulin Rouge!” with some patrons seated at cabaret tables surrounded by the stage action.The Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews on June 17 and to open on July 20, which will make it part of the 2023-24 season. Casting has not been announced.The producers, some of whom have been endeavoring for a decade to bring the show to Broadway, include Hal Luftig, Patrick Catullo, Diana DiMenna, Clint Ramos and Jose Antonio Vargas. Ramos, who is also the show’s costume designer, and Vargas, who is a writer and an immigrant rights advocate, were both born in the Philippines, and the show has hired a Filipino American actress, Giselle Töngi, who is also known as G, as a cultural and community liaison. More