![]() Imelda in “Love” occasionally looks like an old-model Tyrant Barbie: Jacobs changes clothes constantly, and she’s exquisite in terno dresses with high butterfly shoulders. Kleptocracy requires scrupulous image management, and Imelda excelled at playing the provincial sweetheart and the glamorous ambassador, as power demanded. (The show’s unlikely mix of morality play and G-rated rave felt less freighted, at the Public, before 2022 and the ascent of Imelda’s son, Bongbong Marcos, to the Presidency of the Philippines.) Justin Townsend’s wall-of-color lights, David Korins’s mammoth night-club set, and Clint Ramos’s vivid costumes create a setting that both sends up the real Imelda’s passion for Studio 54 glitz and aims to have its own hedonistic fun. What makes a larger impact, though, is a giddy sense of movement: the show’s director, Alex Timbers, and its superb choreographer, Annie-B Parson, whisk the performers across the space’s moving platforms, and even up into catwalks along the balcony, sometimes just to instruct the audience when and how to boogie. These samplings of archival film clips and often jarring data points (about, for instance, mass torture) are the main way that the show communicates key plot developments. Years of development, including a full production at the Public, in 2013, have forged the song cycle into a chronological sequence, with each number contextualized through video montages, by Peter Nigrini. (Tom Gandey and José Luis Pardo also collaborated on certain songs with Byrne.) But, the disco vibe implies, that doesn’t mean we have to have a lousy night! A swift, ninety-minute retelling of Filipino history from 1945 to 1986 plays out in danceable songs by Byrne, who first released “Love” as a concept album, in 2010, co-written with the d.j. For decades, Imelda and her husband, the President and eventual dictator Ferdinand Marcos (Jose Llana), embezzled billions, a level of state theft that needed nine years of brutal martial law in order to operate at scale. tells us to-we meet Imelda (Arielle Jacobs), the sixteen-year-old Rose of Tacloban, a small-town beauty queen who will swell into a self-mythologizing co-despot of the Philippines. We see pink with our eyes closed even the shadows are having a hot time.Īfter the introductory hype-we make some noise when the d.j. ![]() (Moses Villarama) supervises a pre-show beat that goes oomph-oomph-oomph. ![]() The audience members braving the dance floor appear to be swimming in raspberry sauce, herded by ushers in magenta jumpsuits, who wave pink light-up traffic batons. As befits the summer of “Barbie,” the entire Broadway Theatre (the venue’s actual name) seems to have been submerged in a grenadine cocktail: pink L.E.D.s in the lobby’s chandeliers saturate the white plasterwork, and, farther inside, the space has been reconfigured into a huge warehouse-style disco, pulsing with fuchsia and purple neon. The first thing that strikes you at “Here Lies Love,” David Byrne’s participatory pop musical about Imelda Marcos, is a color. ![]()
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