This Ain't No Disco

Dispatches from "Club Millennium"

“Content dictates form” was one of the guiding principle behind Stephen Sondheim’s creative process; the structure of a song, or even a whole musical, was based in the message it was conveying. One would hope this philosophy was a no-brainer, something any composer would put to practice, but after a particularly awful last decade of top-40 pastiche being Frankensteined together to make up a body of songs, it’s unfortunately notable whenever a composer puts in the work and makes a cohesive score. It’s even more notable when they’re not from the Broadway community at all, and are instead one of the most influential and celebrated musicians of Rock and Roll alongside one of the most important DJ’s and producers of the last 30 years. This past Sunday I was able attend one of the final performances of David Bryne and Fatboy Slim’s Here Lies Love, and after dancing my way into culpability for fascism, I thought about the nature of commercial theater, and how (if at all possible) we keep shows like HLL alive.

Here Lies Love is a bio-musical about Imelda Marcos, former first lady of the Philippines and wife of Ferdinand Marcos. The show follows her beginning’s of near-poverty to her whirlwind romance and marriage to Marcos, her jet-setting and disco-hopping decades of power while the Filipino people suffered under their dictatorship, and the Marcos’ eventual ousting from a totally peaceful protest. Think of it as Evita seen through the lens of Studio 54 and a healthy dose of horse tranquilizer. The show’s artistic coup is the total reimagining (and reconstruction) of the Broadway Theatre into “Club Millennium,” a multi-tiered, multi-storied, immersive discotheque. While it does contain the theatre’s original proscenium stage, most of the action happens on a stage in the center, “The Blender,” that twists and turns into different configurations throughout the show, as floor teams in chic jumpsuits armed with glowing wands shepherd the crowd into place. All this is overseen by “DJ,” Club Millennium’s promoter, who hypes the crowd up, teaches them choreography, and eventually acts as the voice of People Power Revolution in the shows final stirring moments.

The show’s score, with lyrics from Byrne and music by him and Fatboy Slim, is one of the catchiest, satisfying, and memorable scores of the past decade (or even longer when you consider it’s origins as a concept album in 2010). Bryne conceived of the show not as a traditional musical but as a club act, based on his own experiences of seeing acts like Grace Jones and Gloria Gaynor perform at Studio 54; form met subject in a perfect match of style and substance when Imelda was a club rat herself (hopefully someone seeing Mel 4Eva performing “Treat Me Like a Toilet” at sksksk will lead to our next great pop musical down the line). The hits in Here lies Love hit; the title track is as good an anthem of any song to come out during the 1970’s, and show-stoppers like “Eleven Days,” centered on the real eleven day romance between the Marcos,’ “Dancing Together,” a hedonistic scene from the dancefloor of Studio 54, and “Please Don’t” a plea from Imelda to the residents of Club Millennium to ignore calls for dissent and accountability as she schmoozes and charms political figures, all contain bulletproof hooks and were able to get the entire theater up and moving, alongside some guidance from DJ over the god-mic.

That gets into the core tension of Here Lies Love - the proceedings necessarily have you dancing with and cheering for a dictator, and have an excellent time doing so. A line from Imelda about how it “takes a woman to do a man’s job” prompted pavlovian neo-lib applause from the audience - mind you this line was about her becoming the defacto leader of the Marcos regime. The show’s trick is to throw a barrage of bops, slays, and bangers at you, causing you to move and groove to a message you may not fully comprehend the insidious nature of; it’s up to the audience to remain critical and inquisitive to the meaning behind the four-on-the-floor. Unlike Evita, who’s original interpretation was a caustic, Brechtian takedown of the title character, HLL’s presentation as a club act that you as an audience member are engaging in naturally leads to us feeling sympathetic to Imelda. This is the show’s most difficult balancing act, and a chunk of the middle saw it faltering to try and make sense of the two poles of Imelda as Donna Summer and Imelda as Marcos. This portion especially is where I wish I was able to see HLL in a smaller venue - the intimacy that was felt at The Public or Seattle Rep would have probably worked to assuage some of the rockier tonal moments, and maybe elements like the (at times distractingly tacky) projection design would have gone down easier.

Tonal stickiness and those projection quibbles aside, the show is a marvel. The physical production, directed by Alex Timbers and choreographed by Annie-B Parsons, throws every theatrical trick in the book at you, incorporating live-stream video, puppets, pageantry, and of course the immersive club setting. My rush ticket put me in the “Lounge” area, a front-facing section removed from the dancefloor and underneath the balcony. As a traditional seat it was excellent, close to the action but still comfortably sat and able to take in the whole environment, except for when the balcony was used - two TV’s in the lounge would stream whenever action (mostly campaign speeches) took place on it. We were eventually taken onto the floor during the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, and being immediately brought into the fold during the tear-jerking song centered on Aquino’s mother followed by Imelda in full Elphaba-mode signing the sensational 11:00 number “Why Don’t You Love Me” from the balcony will forever be one of the most thrilling theatrical moments I’ve ever seen.

There’s so much more I could unpack about Here Lies Love; the fascinating way in which it explores Imelda’s obsession with whiteness, how the entire piece is centered around the damage of obsessing over the American identity tee’d off by the excellent opening banger “American Troglodyte,” how Conrad Ricamora needs to leave his husband for me already, but I want to focus on where we go from here. Here Lives Love is by any conceivable measure a flop; after spending 22 Million dollars on reconstructing the Broadway Theatre into “Club Millennium,” it couldn’t even stick around til’ the holidays, closing in 149 performances. There will be no cast album with its new cast and updated arrangements, and in a crowded season it’s unlikely to remembered when award’s come around next Spring. The show will probably suffer a similar fate to Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812, another immersive, forward-thinking musical that has seen virtually zero productions outside of it’s run due to the nature of its mold-breaking staging, one that’s incredibly difficult for a regional, college, and especially local theater to emulate. So, what do we do with truly audacious, original Broadway musicals? Where they do they go? In fact, why is a Broadway production always the finale ultimo?

Tommy, you may say, of course the desired result of a musical is a long, successful run on Broadway followed by a national tour and a stop oversea’s. But reader, I respond, what about the show’s that do not fit into what a commercially successful, tourist viable musical is supposed to be? Is there a world in which Here Lies Love returned to New York in an engagement like The Donkey Show, a raucous, disco, club-infused retelling of A Midsummer’s Night Dream that ran weekend nights at a performance space owned by the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge for over a decade? Did the team of producers ever think about having HLL, a 90 minute show, take residency in 3 Dollar Bill or even Good Room? Think about it - curtain’s up at 8:00PM, down at 9:30PM, and the participating club is able to get the night started from there with an entire room full of theatergoer’s who are now ready to dance and drink the night away. This is a stupid, non-theater professional answer to a larger problem facing the industry, I’m certainly no David Merrick, but in a post-Covid world where financial success is almost impossible for even the most accessible of musicals, these are conversations we need to be having.

There do seem to be exciting developments in this regard, catch me six sheets to the wind at next summer’s immersive, ballroom-inspired production of Cats, but in the end I find myself mostly just sad about the fate of Here Lies Love. Leaving the theater the only thought I could immediately grasp onto through my post-show high was “damn, that should’ve run for years.” It was a one-of-a-kind show in a landscape that has become increasingly homogenous and it’s a shame that it won’t be able to add life and variety to the Broadway scene any longer. I hope I’ve convinced you to check the show out, and if you want you can give the original concept record or the cast album a listen wherever music is found. If there’s one thing to remember from the experience it’s that a show’s commercial run has no bearing on its artistic achievement or legacy. I’m sure years down the line Talking Heads aficionado’s, alt-theater kids, and Wikipedia rabbit hole explorers will come across a tombstone inscribed here lies love, and join us on the floor.