In David Byrnes Here Lies Love, despotism meets disco

Publish date: 2024-08-18

NEW YORK — The table in David Byrne’s office is stacked high with printed matter — all about the Philippines. Following the success of his concert-style show “American Utopia,” Byrne, 71, is setting the stage for another Broadway production: “Here Lies Love,” a disco musical about Imelda Marcos.

Composed with Fatboy Slim, the musical premiered off-Broadway at New York’s Public Theater in 2013. It’s invested in the synthetic sound of karaoke — a cultural staple of Filipino lives — and features Filipino producers and an all-Filipino cast, historic for Broadway and for the Philippines.

I’ve listened to Byrne’s music since I was a kid in Tacloban, a small provincial city in the Philippines made infamous by its association with the former first lady, who grew up there. A child of the ’70s, I was shaped by disco and dictatorship. But the MTV spectacle of “Stop Making Sense,” the 1984 Jonathan Demme concert film of the Talking Heads’ road show, ran through my teenage years: MTV broke out at the same time we in Manila were joining street marches against the corruption of dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Those protests would become the People Power Revolution, which restored democracy to the country.

“Here Lies Love” portrays the rise of first lady Imelda and her family’s eventual fall from power. The story entwines matters of my childhood — disco, Byrne, martial law, marches, Tacloban. In 2013, I saw it at the Public four times. That is to say, I danced. The show was disturbing. But, most of all, as I’ve written before, it was a thrill and a weird joy.

You’re plopped in medias res into the tawdry illusions of Imelda but quickly move into a historical moment of protest: the 1986 people’s rebellion that followed the killing, three years earlier, of senator and Marcos opponent Ninoy Aquino. Filipinos ousted the Marcos family, who were helicoptered to Hawaii by their friend Ronald Reagan.

Byrne’s musical is an immersive, experiential surprise — not just a spectacle. The seats in the orchestra section are removed to create a dancing arena (you can still watch on the balcony, or in the front or rear mezzanine, but I strongly recommend the dance floor, as watching from above dilutes the existential terror of participation and complicity essential to the show).

As a child, I literally danced for Imelda on airport tarmacs, where, as schoolchildren, and having practiced for months, we would greet her on her birthday visits to Tacloban. That obscene memory returned to me at Byrne’s simulated, propulsive discothèque.

Sigmund Freud, in “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” writes about moments when “a piece of reality or a piece of [one’s] own self has become strange.” That remembrance of the past through the estrangement of the real — in this case, through the cathartic, anomalous thrill of disco — is the crux of Byrne’s musical.

Byrne and I talked recently at his office in Manhattan about the progress of his musical, its connection to his evolution as an artist, and what it means to the Philippines to have another Marcos, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., also known as Bongbong, now in power.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Q: What moved you to bring “Here Lies Love” back now?

A: The show has maybe more relevance. Partly because another Marcos is in power. You see the process that happened in the Philippines repeating itself all over the world. Now, whether it’s in Russia or Hungary or Egypt — or the United States — you see this kind of authoritarian rule being established, or places sliding toward it all over the world. So it’s a worldwide phenomenon as opposed to, oh, that just happened in the Philippines.

Q: I’ve always wondered whether it’s a disco piece that became political or a political question that disco solved.

A: There was a version with just the parallel stories of Imelda and her maid. Then I realized, I also have to deal with the People Power Revolution. So the emphasis also goes to Ninoy Aquino as a parallel. I wrote a song based on a really wonderful book, an oral history of the People Power Revolution. I pored over it and realized I could do a song as if someone is just there, just picking phrases, using their words. That was the key to unlocking the story.

Q: How about the concept of audience immersion?

A: I had seen some musical performers who had hit dance records. They would perform in discos. They would do like a karaoke set. The songs were very short. I thought, “Wow, what if you could do that for a whole evening? Wouldn’t that be amazing?” DJs talk about their arc of an evening, that you build it up. What if that was a narrative arc, not just a musical energy? Later, I read that Imelda loved going to Studio 54. She had a disco ball in her townhouse. I saw a video of her dancing with an arms dealer …

Q: Adnan Khashoggi.

A: Yes, dancing with Khashoggi under her disco ball at her New York townhouse. Wow. What if that’s the story that gets told? Given how popular karaoke is in the Philippines.

Q: It’s the land of karaoke. Facebook and karaoke — that’s us.

A: Then it all fits perfectly. So the performers are singing live, but the musical backing is prerecorded like karaoke, and the play is in a club. We give it that heady, frothy environment. I’m thinking that excitement is what it might feel like to be a person in power. And for an audience who feels like they’re participating in all that excitement.

Q: You’ve talked about how the arc of “American Utopia” goes from being inside the brain to outside, engaged with larger issues. But before “American Utopia,” you had already written this political play. I think the arc here is a fascinating inverse of “American Utopia”: It begins with the political and goes internal.

A: In “American Utopia,” the character I’m playing is a little bit of myself. You follow how they change, they find friends, community. In the end, they engage with the larger world. I was thinking about this with “Here Lies Love,” that the characters don’t change. It’s the audience that changes. The audience is very important to the show — their participation. They’re the ones excited about the glamour. The audience is completely seduced; there’s the music, and everyone’s dancing. Then, as happened in the Philippines, they feel at some point they’ve been betrayed. They had the rug pulled out. And the audience realizes, we got tricked. So it’s the audience who has a change of mind. Not the characters.

Q: The audience has to be so alert. Even your gaps matter. For instance, you don’t include the shoes — Imelda’s 3,000 shoes. Personally, I think it’s a weird Western thing, the obsession with her shoes, as if a person from the so-called Third World is not allowed to desire shoes. You mentioned shoes only once.

A: Yeah, when she’s young and talks about not having any shoes. And I thought — that’s it. That’s all you’ll get. People know about the shoes. It’s a preconceived idea that they bring to the theater.

Q: You also did not include the killings — the dead bodies during the Marcos regime. There’s an aspect of this play where the gaps create the audience’s bodily response. It’s eerie. When you realize, as she’s singing her love songs, people are dying, killed by the regime. How intentional was that?

A: In the context of the show, I wasn’t sure how to deal with the massacres and bombs and death. Or even the U.S. connection with the Philippines and the U.S. support of Marcos.

Q: The gaps work because you’re dancing with the dictator. The play mirrors that past — or present. America was dancing with the dictator through the ’70s well into — now, I guess.

A: The show is critical of the Marcos regime, but it allows the audience to experience the way Filipino people felt they were seduced by the Marcoses. It’s also saying, look what happens when elected officials decide they don’t want to leave. We’ve got one in this country right now, somebody who refuses to accept an election result.

Q: So, again, an emblem of what happens to a country when justice is not done to those who wreck your democracy.

A: Exactly. It’s a story of how that can happen.

Q: Because the Marcoses weren’t punished.

A: I know! They were given a place in Hawaii!

Q: You’re doing art during a time of disinformation, when nuanced art can be twisted on social media. At the same time, people imagine political art to be stripped of ambiguity. But your play shows us how nuance is political art — that nuance is a way to speak political truths.

A: I want the audience to have a sense of what the drive for power feels like. They can have a different, and, I think, deeper understanding of why things happened if they actually feel it themselves.

Q: It’s a beautiful way to conceive of art — to include its bodily effect. Your art creates surprise in the body. In that sense, it’s similar to what an activist wants: to spark a reaction, a change. Your art wishes also to address something beyond oneself. Have you ever thought about how your art, even with the Talking Heads and “Stop Making Sense,” seems to wish to change the way a body feels?

A: Um. Wow. I know at some point, I was trying to find a community and family, a community of artists or friends. Trying to let the audience and other people know that I might be a little unusual, but it’s okay, and you might be unusual, too, and that’s okay. You can be accepted. You can have fun. And then later, it becomes more kind of social and politically where I need to go.

Q: Around the time of “Here Lies Love”?

A: Yeah. I started writing songs that I thought were addressing social and political issues. But it was hard to do it in songs. I listen to some of those songs now, and it sounds like somebody who’s frustrated and angry but doesn’t know how to express it in an artistic way.

Q: “Here Lies Love” is narrative. The solution is story. I’m a novelist, so I like that thought. The narrative paralleling Imelda and her childhood maid and confidante, Estrella, created a way, in the figure of Estrella, for the Filipinos to have a voice — an equal voice. Which remains in the play.

A: She was the stand-in for ordinary people.

Q: And there’s a historic aspect: It’s the first time a Broadway play has been produced by Filipinos. And an all-Filipino cast!

A: I wanted producers who understand what it means, not just to them personally but to the Filipino community. The fact that I decided I could do a show about Philippine history — okay, you better do your research.

Here Lies Love Previews begin June 17 at the Broadway Theatre, New York. herelieslovebroadway.com.

Gina Apostol is a Filipino-born writer based in New York. She is the author of “La Tercera,” “Insurrecto” and “The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata,” among other novels.

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In David Byrnes Here Lies Love, despotism meets disco