Like many Broadway musicals, “Here Lies Love” involves a lot of dancing. Notably less common: how much movement the audience makes.
It’s unusual for a musical to tell the story of a dictator’s wife, but this one, with songs by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, clearly focuses on its subject’s dancing habits. Imelda Marcos — wife of Ferdinand Marcos, the long-time president of the Philippines — loved the discothèque. Accordingly, the Broadway Theater was half-converted into a club on the model of Studio 54. There was a giant disco ball and a DJ, and the orchestra seats were stripped so that up to 300 audience members could experience a 90-minute show while jamming on a dance floor.
As at a disco, those standing can dance as they please. But they too are carried by fighters in magenta jumpsuits with light-up wands like those used to direct taxiing planes. Wheeled platforms and runways are regularly arranged around the floor area, dispersing audience members. A cruciform platform is aptly called Blender. It churns the crowd like batter.
Others were seated in the audience, above the dance floor and back in the depths of the mezzanine. But this audience was also on the move, encouraged by the DJ to join the standing crowd in a simple line dance, picking up moves from the cast members spread throughout the theater on more platforms and catwalks. A lot of story action happens there as well.
“The audience’s body interaction is quite extraordinary,” says Annie-B Parson, the show’s choreographer. “And when you engage the body, you also engage the mind and heart.”
“Here Lies Love” developed over a decade in various incarnations, but the dance and movement of the audience was at the heart of the conception from the beginning, says Alex Timbers, the director: “We didn’t want for it to be interactive. , with people pulling off the stage and feeling embarrassed. We want the audience to move as a unit so no one feels singled out.”
The idea is to cast the audience in the drama as extras, Timbers said. They don’t just dance in the club. They were guests at the Marcos wedding; the public at political rallies and election parties; witnesses to the assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr., Marcos’ 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 murder, you feel a little sympathetic about dancing at Imelda’s wedding.”
Similarly, the DJ telling everyone what to do is a bit dictatorial. When Marcos instituted martial law, no member of the audience was “tortured or anything,” says Timbers, “but there was a metaphor that physically played out.”
“You watch the audience applaud,” says Parson, “and you watch them wonder why they’re applauding. It’s Brechtian beauty.”
Developing the show was a trial-and-error experiment in how to get viewers to move as the creative team wanted. “You don’t have the same audience every night,” says Timbers, “so you look at trends, at human nature.”
Detailed charts illustrate how wranglers can redistribute the crowd effectively and safely without disruption. And since the people on the mezzanine face one direction while those on the floor face several, directing everyone to “step right” in a line dance is not a simple matter. (Good placement of performers and video screens helps.)
Parson, who has worked with Byrne on concert tours and his recent Broadway show, “American Utopia,” comes from the world of postmodern dance. He said that while Timbers “has a great sense of body and space,” he and she have conflicting, if complementary, thoughts about the fact that no member of the “Here Lies Love” audience can see everything.
“Alex worked very hard to share all the story material with everyone in the theater,” he says, as he reflects on composer John Cage’s philosophical idea that every seat in the house is perfect. “It becomes about perception. I like the experience of watching someone watch things that I might not see. You feel things in your body that you might not see.”
It is 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 glamor and play of the club atmosphere counteracts the show’s criticism of the Marcoses.
Parson says the context of disco is deliberately vague — “an ecstatic dance form that quickly became hopeless.” “Dancing is relative. You can use it for sickness or for greater good.”
Imelda’s use of dance, which became known as her handbag diplomacy, “provided statesmanship,” Parson said. “He did not set a table between Nixon or Castro. He invited them to dance. He was not a great dancer but that gave him a lot of power.”
At one point, cast members act it out, wearing masks of famous political leaders. At other points, the choreography borrows some of Imelda’s signature moves: circling her eyes with two fingers, tapping the top of her butterfly sleeves.
Line dance, Parson says, is designed to be “fun and easy, something you can do in a chair if space is 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 complex, but mostly tonal, Parson said. In the title song, for example, Imelda tells the audience to remember her for love. “But let’s talk about the families he destroyed,” Parson said. “The song is beautiful, but is ironic, that’s why I choreographed, with swinging umbrellas and sternum to the ceiling. You can’t stand straight.”
Timothy Matthew Flores, who plays Aquino’s son among other ensemble roles, said that the detail of Parson’s choreography — “every single movement has a meaning” — made it more difficult than the flashier and harder-hitting dance that he did it before. And running around the big theater is “90 minutes of cardio.”
But getting the audience out of their seats and dancing? It’s just fun, Flores said. “They start out shy and then they have a really good time. You can see them thinking, ‘Wow, this is not like any other Broadway show.'”
