David Byrne and Taper Director on the Show Reaching L.A.

Fascism has arrived and settled into Los Angeles. And before you say “Tell us something we don’t already know,” this refers to the opening on this coast of “Here Lies Love,” the David Byrne-created musical about the Philippines’ dictatorial First Lady, Imelda Marcos, now getting its L.A. premiere at the Mark Taper Forum. A whole different set of audiences is being posed with the musical question: Do disco balls and martial law mix?

During the show’s 2023 Broadway run, SRO audiences were encouraged to dance in place and ponder despots at the same time — a greater disassotiative challenge than walking and chewing gum at the same time, but hardly an insurmountable one. For this engagement (just opened, and newly extended through April 6), the audience remains seated, since ripping seats out for ironic boogieing was a bridge too far for a Music Center venue. The good news: “Here Lies Love” remains one of the most intriguing and rewarding “rock musicals” ever to emerge from the brain of a major pop figure. And that’s with or without the innovative staging that caused New York theatergoers to have to use their brains to figure out which way to move as ushers literally directed traffic on a constantly shifting dance floor.

Byrne admits that he never foresaw the musical being produced without the constant audience participation that has been a part of all previous productions. But he’s not objecting to it being done as more of a traditional proscenium musical in L.A., mind you… just wondering if the impact will be the same.

“I’m very curious how the non-immersive staging will work,” Byrne tells Variety, in an email interview about the Taper production. He’s busy overseas with his acclaimed “Who Is the Sky?” tour — a traveling show that has its own revolutionary sense of invention — so he will have to get reports on how well this version has weathered a less radicalized treatment. “The immersive disco setting put the audience in the position of the Philippine people, and that worked,” he says, “so I’m curious if that connection will still happen.”

Initial audience and critic responses have been highly favorable, including among those who have some experience of previous presentations, which stretch back to an initial off-Broadway run at New York’s Public in 2013. The direction of this version has been undertaken by the man who directs the Center Theatre Group as an institution: CTG artistic director Snehal Desai. He’s wanted to direct “Here Lies Love” since he saw it at the Public 13 years ago. And once he took the reins of the Music Center venues, he came to believe that the Mark Taper Forum was immersive enough. It does have the western United States’ most famous thrust stage, after all, so the line between audience and actors is more thinly drawn even on a normal night out in the up-close-and-personal, 739-seat space.

Says Desai, “When I saw the show in 2013 at the Public, I was just so taken with it — taken with the experience of it, but also just the storytelling and the sung-through format. You’re there for this kind of disco party celebration where you’re kind of like, ‘Well, I know this isn’t a good person. What am I doing?’ The complicity [with Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos] is happening, and then the rug is pulled out, and suddenly, what was a kind of a party turns into almost a rally. I viscerally remember that experience.

“When I saw it at the Public, everyone was standing,” the director notes. “But then when it went to Broadway, I experienced it from the seats.” (The balcony of the Broadway Theatre remained intact, and a few elevated mezzanine rows were constructed on either side of the so-called dance floor.) “And I was like, ‘Oh, the storytelling still works.’

“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.’”

With everyone seated on a rake, Desai didn’t think it still made sense to pretend the night is starting out inside an actual 1970s disco, as in New York. Changing that opening locale offered a chance to do something even more specifically Filipino, he thought, after consulting with the mostly AAPI creative team. “We knew we’re not gonna make it so everyone’s moving around the whole time. But how can we make it a space particularly that, particularly to the Filipino community, is a world they recognize. That’s where my scenic designer said, ‘You know, the show lends itself to these noontime variety shows that they have in the Philippines. There are these long-running shows that are oftentimes multi hours, with a variety-show feel, and there’s a host who’s holding everything together.’ And I thought, ‘That might be it. We can be a noontime variety show format.’ Then the audience is a studio audience, invited still to interact like a studio audience is, but we’re not fully in a club disco world the whole time.”

That entailed the Taper’s dramaturg writing up one new character not in previous productions, the drag-queen TV host, Imeldific (Aura Mayari, of Season 15 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race”), who provides a bit of spoken scene-setting near the beginning to help familiarize the audience with the milieu, in a musical that is for all intents and purposes sung-through. (Projections with names, dates and pertinent historical details also help provide context that the songs alone can’t.) But the new emcee doesn’t substantially change the show, and it doesn’t stay in either a disco or a TV studio for long. Desai points out what a logistical challenge “Here Lies Love” is to design and direct, in any setting: “It’s a crazy show. There’s 31 songs and there’s 30 transitions” — all in a very fast-moving hour and a half, with no intermission.

Given all those possible speed bumps — from having to establish core historical facts while crooning is occurring, to rapid-fire scene and costume changes that often seem to be happening even faster than the b.p.m. pace set up by Byrne’s and Fatboy Slim’s busy score — the Taper production has not only met most of the standards of previous productions but established some new ones. The dancing on stage is more vigorous and exciting than ever, as if William Carlos Angulo, the choreographer, felt that he had to make up for the lack of participatory audience dancing (or shuffling) by making what the cast is doing that much more vivacious. David Byrne fans make up one natural audience for the show, and Filipinos another. But if anyone who doesn’t give a whoop about Talking Heads or the Phillipines comes in wanting the traditional virtues of costume and dance — and maybe some head-turning whiplash as the action moves around the audience — this “Here Lies Love” has the effect of offering show-biz enchantments even for those less intrigued by its exotic aspects.

But, with apologies to Tracy Chapman, we are talkin’ about a revolution. So how is the show’s political relevance holding up in 2026?

Talk about a loaded question: Even if you’ve followed the course of the show back not just to its first staging but to Byrne’s original 2010 concept double-album, there will be plenty of moments in this production of “Here Lies Love” where you may have to defy your instinctual feeling that this was written in the last few years as an allegory.

Says Byrne, “I’m aware there’s a huge Filipino community in L.A .and around, so the show should resonate for them — it’s their history. Some may look on the People Power revolution as a positive example for the world (I do), while others will be Marcos loyalists (guess who is back in power!).” That last remark refers to Bongbong Marcus, son of the late Imelda and Ferdinand, who now leads the country, not so many decades after his parents were forcefully driven out of it.

Byrne continues, “I hope non-Filipinos will see some parallels in the show — how populist leaders can actually sometimes deliver on their promises — but there is the danger of seducing the public and holding on to power too long.

“The story has sadly remained relevant beyond the Philippines,” Byrne adds. “Without giving too much away, the peaceful People Power revolution that ousted a corrupt dictator and his wife is hugely encouraging — it has been done before and can be done again.” And he leaves the obvious contemporary parallels as that, for now.

Desai is more explicit about the reverberations this has for any audience in the present day — which are likely to be received with appreciative nods in L.A. If the show were being staged somewhere deep in MAGA country, it might start to become as uncomfortable for them as it is for Claudius in “Hamlet” when he just sits down to watch a nice play… even if its take on the Marcoses was all conceived during the Obama years.

Desai was in rehearsals when we first spoke with him last month. “As we’re rehearsing right now, there is a big march happening here in downtown L.A.,” he said. “And literally every day as we work on this show, what we’re seeing in this country is kind of the fascist dictators’ playbook, right? Don Lemon just got arrested. It’s press that they’re really going after today. Yesterday was about the censorship that’s coming out with TikTok now changing ownership. A few days before, it was the front lines in Minneapolis. The people who have been leading the fight are the clergy, and even the Pope has spoken out. So a lot of the things that are happening are running very parallel to what happened in the Philippines during the Marcos regime. And we know that this wanting to enact censorship and martial law in this country is something that this president wants.

“So what I loved about this musical is, I felt that I went on a journey and experience, but I left reminded that I can empower myself and we can all empower ourselves by coming together, by rallying together. And you know, I didn’t think when we planned this a year ago exactly how far we would be in terms of the moment of what’s happening nationally.”

One sensitivity any time “Here Lies Love” has been produced has been to the sensibilities of parts of the Filipino community that may suspect the show is a glorification of the Marcoses (although, as Byrne said, a few might welcome that), given how few musicals have ultimately unsympathetic characters in the leads. In the Taper production, you can feel Imelda being given some sharp and brittle edges earlier into her girlhood scenes than she was on Broadway, where she was a little more mistakable for a Disney princess in her opening reading of the title song, before she increasingly breaks bad. A lot of community outreach was done in New York to make sure that most in the Filipino community who were engaged “got” it, and were able to take pride in a show with an all-Filipino cast and primarily Filipino behind-the-scenes team, even if the Marcoses hardly prompt pride.

“I think the story is the start of the conversation, right?” says the director. “We have worked really hard, particularly in the second act, to make sure this is not meant to glamorize anyone. And if anything, the folks who have the arc of the journey, who have the change, are the community that leads to the People Power revolution. So Imelda, Marcos and Aquino (a more heroic figure in the action), they don’t have full redemptive arcs like traditional musical characters, which is something David and I talked a lot about. But someone needs to, so that it’s a fulfilling experience.” It’s an interesting conceit: Although the show has some secondary characters to root for, the real hero and protagonist is the long-suffering, eventually triumphant chorus line, as it were — a chorale that gets the last word in the show, when the neo-disco rhythms give way to a beautiful power-to-the-people folk song.

“L.A. is the home to the largest Filipino community outside of the Philippines,” points out Desai, who himself has Indian heritage. “As an artistic producer, this is I think the fifth project I’ve worked on that is a Filipino story. There is an amazing community, but then Filipino artists, it’s like they grow up eating and drinking musical theater as well as karaoke and stuff like that, and they’re just such great performers. So this was one of the easiest casting processes — easy in that I had many, many options of who we could cast for this show. I wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, where’s my Imelda?’ I could have cast the show so many times over.”

There are a few people in the cast with previous “Here Lies Love” experience: “Joan Almedilla, who’s our Aurora, was actually one of the first performers that David called when, after the concept album came out, she performed in the Carnegie Hall concerts they did. Then as Imelda we have Reanne Acasio, who was on Broadway playing Aurora and then was the Imelda understudy. We have Carol Angeli, who plays Estrella, and then Joshua Dela Cruz (as Aquino), who was involved when the show was at Williamstown. So we have artists who are involved with the show in all different gestations of its life. And then the rest of the company is L.A. actors who are just phenomenal voices…

“The design team is predominantly Filipino. Our music director is Filipino. Our dramaturg is. The process was made to make sure that we incorporated as many voices as possible, including so many folks who had their own personal experiences of experiencing martial law or knowing family members who were impacted… And you’ll hear a lot more Tagalog in the storytelling. There’s some traditional Filipino folk dancing that makes an appearance, some tinkering with things like that. I wanted it to feel like an environment that the community would recognize and see themselves reflected in. And the costumes do that a lot, too.”

Other tinkering involved adding a bit of music not heard in the Broadway version. “One of the things that was part of the show, but we’re now bringing back as a refrain or reprise, is ‘American Troglodyte,’ which is the song that opens the show. As the opening song, it’s really rousing. But you’re like, ‘Wait, what are you saying? I’m a little uncomfortable.’ And you see that song and that phrase kind of go on its own journey, when it’s first a part of a big disco number and the second time when it’s just sung a cappella directly to you. And then there are two songs that weren’t in there, brought in from David’s concept album. ‘Never So Big’ is a song with Estrella, who is Imelda’s nanny and housekeeper but also confidante, whom Imelda ultimately turns her back on. We wanted to make sure that that throughline was there, because the whole show was created as a song cycle between those two women, originally. And the other added song is ‘Whole Man,’ which comes in at the end. I wanted a moment where you saw a little bit of Imelda unraveling, but no one really questioning it, and then I also wanted a second just to show Aquino sitting in a jail cell for seven years while she’s out in the world philosophizing about love and beauty.

“With this show, you’re kind of like shot out of a cannon, especially if you’re new to the story. It doesn’t stop. And so it was a little bit of, like, where can we put in some of these moments where we can just give everyone a second to reflect and breathe, and also have these characters on stage have a moment for us to have connection or stillness, before we get into the next chapter of things.”

Byrne, for his part, is happy to see this production happening, even if he probably won’t get to see it. “Sadly I won’t be around for the opening; my tour dates were already set and tickets on sale.” But, he says, “Selfishly, yes, if this works, I’m sure other theaters will be watching and will want to pick it up. The music and the karaoke-style vocals are not typical for Broadway-style musicals, so that could be a plus for some demographics as well. A key ingredient is the sound: it should really sound like a club, plenty of low end and groove, which is also atypical for Broadway.”

He didn’t give up on the show finding a wider in the audience in the 13 years between concept album and Broadway, and he’s not seeing an end in sight for it now. “I believe it has plenty of life left,” Byrne says. “Look at all the pop artists who have done disco and dance music records in the last few years! And the story, as you say, is maybe more close to home and relevant than ever.”

“Here Lies Love” runs at the Mark Taper Forum through April 5. Tickets can be found at centertheatregroup.org.