The acclaimed musical Here Lies Love had one of the most unique productions on Broadway in recent years, completely transforming the theatre into a standing room only venue to create a dance party on the floor.
Here Lies Love follows former First Lady of the Philippines Imelda Marcos and her family’s rise to power and subsequent fall at the hands of the Philippine People Power Revolution.
Now, the musical, with a concept and music by David Byrne, has arrived in Los Angeles with a reimagined production. The show is now playing at Center Theatre Group’s Mark Taper Forum and the audience is seated this time.
Byrne is overseas on tour so he hasn’t been able to see the new production, but he commented in a new Variety interview.
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“I’m very curious how the non-immersive staging will work,” he said. “The immersive disco setting put the audience in the position of the Philippine people, and that worked, so I’m curious if that connection will still happen.”
Director Snehal Desai commented on the changes. He told Variety, “The thing about the Taper is, it doesn’t have that fourth-wall separation. We’re all in the same room. When someone gets up to go to the bathroom, everyone notices everything! So I was like, I think we can tell the story in this space, and we don’t have to rip out the seats, but we can activate the entire Taper. We can have different areas [amid the audience] where we stage things, and then we can still have moments where we invite folks to stand up and join with us, or maybe have a few members come on stage so that it can lend itself to the experience. But it doesn’t have to be fully immersive in the way that it was at the Public. Because both times I watched it, I thought, ‘This whole element of it is fun, it’s intriguing, but there’s no reason this couldn’t be staged traditionally, either.’”
The musical is running through April 5. Get tickets now! Shows are selling out, so act quickly.
