No shock then that essentially the most expressive factor in “Here Lies Love” (together with Clint Ramos’s costumes, which additionally transfer fantastically) is the choreography by Annie-B Parson. Based on small hand gestures and huge site visitors patterns, it suggests a fuller spectrum of human engagement than the in any other case narrowly centered and typically mechanical manufacturing achieves.
Is it fallacious to hunt that engagement extra absolutely? (Or as Imelda sings: “Is it a sin to love too much?”) For most of its 90 intermission-less minutes, “Here Lies Love” finesses the query, preferring to be handled as something — an artwork object, a dance occasion — in addition to what it’s. In that manner, it remembers Byrne’s Broadway live performance “American Utopia,” on which Timbers and Parson additionally collaborated. But that present, which had no story, wanted solely to be glossy and fulfilling to attain its factors.
“Here Lies Love” bets that glamour could make up for narrative — or, quite, that in a present concerning the risks of political demagogy, glamour itself is the narrative. It’s a case of kind follows perform into the fireplace. We are drawn to cultural and political pleasure in a lot the identical, usually harmful manner.
Perhaps the irony of constructing a musical about that’s extra viscerally considerable down on the dance flooring. It was for me on the Public, the place nearly everybody needed to stand and be a part of the story, not observers of it. (There have been solely 42 seats.) And maybe, 10 years later, with our personal politics wanting much more just like the Marcoses’, nobody can afford to maintain a distance.
In any case, on Broadway, it’s not till the beautiful final music, “God Draws Straight,” that the fabric matches the motion in a manner that reaches the balcony. Led by Moses Villarama, and based mostly on feedback by eyewitnesses to the peaceable 1986 revolution, it acknowledges the ethical superiority of its actual heroes — the Philippine individuals — in the one manner a musical can: by giving it stunning voice. Finally, it’s OK to applaud.
Here Lies Love
At the Broadway Theater, Manhattan; herelieslovebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour half-hour.
Source: www.nytimes.com