Review: HERE LIES LOVE at Mark Taper Forum

Bring on the revolution. But first, hit that beat!

The Mark Taper Forum is pulsating again, this time to the strains of disco and dissent. Center Theatre Group Artistic Director Snehal Desai has lit the fuse, glamming up the venue that represents the heart of the city’s theatrical legacy to house the L.A. premiere of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s HERE LIES LOVE. This L.A. premiere arrives 16 months after another Desai-directed cage-rattler - GREEN DAY’S AMERICAN IDIOT, co-produced with Deaf West Theatre - reopened the Taper after the venue was shuttered during financial difficulties.

Folks who caught that previous production (the Taper’s most successful musical) will notice similarities – the eye-popping production values, muscular dancing, heady themes in service of a product that is not MAMMA MIA. With so many delights and leaning heavily into both the political moment that is recounts and what America is experiencing in the here and now, HERE LIES LOVE rocks as aggressively as it rallies. Where the 2023 Broadway version directed by Alex Timbers was its own animal, the Taper production is a re-imagined production featuring additional songs as well an all Filipino and a mostly AAPI creative team.

Having begun life as a concept album in 2006, the musical charts the rise of Filipino First Lady Imelda Marcos from humble beginnings to her tenure as the wealth-loving and corrupt leader, up to the People Power Revolution that led to her family’s exile to Hawaii. President Ferdinand Marcos and Imelda’s former lover-turned-political-opponent Ninoy Aquino play prominent roles, but this one’s every inch the Imelda show. Call it EVITA LITE (Evita Leyte?), but instead of Che Guevara, our guide through the Imelda follies is a variety show host incarnation of Imelda, a drag persona known as Imeldific (played by Aura Mayari) who kicks things off with “American Troglodyte,” a ditty celebrating America's wealth and cultural opulence to which Imelda Romualdez aspires.

Young Imelda (Reanne Acasio), as pretty as she is ambitious, has decidedly different values than her friend Estrella Cumpas (Carol Angeli). Imelda falls for social justice-minded rich kid Ninoy Aquino (Joshua Dela Cruz), but he dumps her for a more suitable match. Undeterred, Imelda rebounds, makes her way to Manilla and attracts the attention of a different stripe of politico, Senator Ferdinand Marcos (Chris Renfro). Less than two weeks after their meeting, the two are married and the ascendancy begins. Parties, travels, wardrobe upgrades, affairs, betrayals, imprisonment, torture, assassinations, revolutions…Imelda lived through it all.

Life may have felt like it was moving quickly for Imelda Marcos, but perhaps not this quickly. But that’s the construction of HERE LIVES LOVE whose creators are positioning their tale as an entry into larger conversation, not a deep dive. Looking to cover a 40-year span in 90 minutes, the sung-through musical occasionally feels like it’s as much in a hurry as young Ninoy Aquino had been. We are provided biographical information via splashy musical numbers which Desai, the music directors Joe Cruz and Jennifer Lin and especially choreographer William Carols Angulo deliver to great “join the party!” effect. Sometimes members of the Taper crowds actually do take the stage to participate in a rally or a rave. Select Ferdinand and Ninoy rallying speeches are delivered from the audience. Yee Eun Nam’s projections give us plenty of information and eye candy.

An insightful director who can blend substance and spectacle, Desai helmed many a musical during his tenure as the artistic director at East West Players – everything from ASSASSINS to ALLEGIANCE to, yup, even MAMMA Mia. The size and configuration of the Taper lends itself smartly to these more intimate, in-your-face experiences then, say, the neighboring Ahmanson. With this space and all these technical bells and whistles at his disposal, the director knows how to deploy them. Experientially, HERE LIES LOVE is a blast.

Amidst all this angry/ironic revelry, do we also invest? Well, we are certainly encouraged to, especially considering whose corner we’re supposed to occupy (or abadon).  Acasio has a lovely voice and convincingly keeps us in her corner both as ingenue and anti-heroine (the musical eschews shoe jokes). The song “Here Lies Love” (Imelda’s imagined epitaph, warbled amidst a chorus of girls by a still naïve Imelda) is bookended by the bitter “Why Don’t You Love Me?” addressed to her country in revolt. By the time Joan Almedilla’s Aurorua Aquino arrives late in the play – essentially in a cameo appearance - to sing the eulogy “Just Ask the Flowers,” getting everyone to flash those Laban signs, we’ve settled into our outrage. After everything we’ve seen the Marcoses do, the song is a dog whistle, by no means the production’s first.    

And on a certain level, that’s cool. This is not a documentary. Los Angeles has the largest concentration of Filipinos outside of the country, a fact of which CTG is keenly aware. The program provides a range of dramaturgical material including notes, interviews, a guide to historic Filipinotown, even a QT code link to a contextual syllabus, a 12-week series encouraging further exploration. So I guess my opening call should be “pump up the volume, start the revolution, and then hit the books!”

HERE LIES LOVE plays through April 5 at 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

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