By Ed Diokno
Get ready to par-tee! The award-winning musical about the rise and fall of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos will be coming to the West Coast.
Here Lies Love will be playing in Seattle followed by San Francisco in 2017 after an extensive run in London and leaving its Broadway home in 2014.
Start saving up your money. The tickets for these shows are going to cost a pretty penny.
Exact dates and venues will be announced later.
The David Byrne and Fatboy Slim production requires a theater that allows the audience to stand throughout the 90-minute show. The disco-theme musical turns the space into a nightclub, the streets of Manila and a beauty contest stage and the audience transforms into the witnesses, protestors or nightclub revelers as the line between the performers and audience blurs.
It’s Evita in a disco and the audience becomes part of the production.
In New York and London, the show received rave reviews garnering accolades for its stars. It won a 2015 Tony Award for Love’s first Imelda portrayed by Ruthie Ann Miles.
In Seattle the show will be part of the Seattle Repertory Theatre’s 2016-2017 season. It was there that Marcos henchmen killed two Filipino American union activists. Gene Viennese and Silme Domingo.
It will be interesting to see how the Here Lies Love is received in San Francisco as part of the American Conservatory Theatre’s season. The San Francisco Bay Area was the center of the anti-Marcos expatriate movement during the 20-year reign of the Philippines’ conjugal dictatorship. I suspect there will be a few tears at the eulogy of Benign Aquino, a Marcos rival assassinated on the airport tarmac upon his return to Manila from San Francisco. And a few cheers when Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos get on the plane to their Hawaiian exile.
(Ed Diokno writes a blog :Views From The Edge: news and analysis from an Asian American perspective.)
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