On the cusp of summer at the end of June in Broadway in New York, a theater is awash in the shifting tints of retro-disco. Streams of emerald, crimson and magenta immerse a crowd, seducing them to party. “Here Lies Love” is playing, as if to greet its fabled subject, Imelda Marcos, on her 94th birthday, which comes two days before the 4th of July.

The sensorium further convulses hereon: mirror ball, dance floor, chandelier, moving stages, glow sticks and devices of the carnival kind. A DJ/narrator swaggers in, promising the giddy audience a heady trip to the Philippines, which is front and center of this production—and the vehicle is karaoke, medium par excellence of impersonation. After its launch as a concept album and a run off-Broadway, “Here Lies Love” takes another stab at staging the life of a much-maligned, much-adulated figure, arguably the most famous Filipino after the Malayan polymath Jose Rizal. And the result is perplexing, for both its plot and its politics.

The story revolves around the former first lady, notorious for her racks of shoes, her rise to power and the nervous breakdown that came with them. It dwells on her potent beauty and the excess to which it gave life. It begins in Tacloban, the capital of the province of Leyte, where she grew up in makeshift wear, and ends in an airlift from the Palace for exile in Hawaii.

While Imelda (Arielle Jacobs), in the vein of the Argentinian Evita Peron, is surely the fulcrum of this part-soap opera, part-pageant, two characters flank her totem: a fictional servant named Estrella Cumpas (Melody Butiu), who is a foil to the Madam, and the historical Ninoy Aquino (Conrad Ricamora), cast as her suitor, critic and ultimately, nemesis. Hovering above them is Ferdinand Marcos (Jose Llana), the Third World strongman who styles his wife like Pygmalion, gets caught in a tryst with an American actress and inevitably becomes too sick to rule.

Imelda comes out of this thick haze glamorous and artful, iconic in her signature silhouette of butterfly sleeves, bouffant and décolletage, and traipsing the globe as a coy and cunning envoy, or in her words, as her country’s star and slave, a persona too good to be true. As she once said, “When a person touches somebody, or kisses somebody, or embraces somebody, why do they do it? They want to see if you’re real.”

Well, the disco in Malacañang was real, too.

Camp energy

“Here Lies Love” harnesses the camp energy that Imelda has exuded over time, trading on her loony neurosis and the lurid scheming that attends petty and high-stakes power play. Director Alex Timbers and choreographer Annie-B Parson stir up a fairground spectacle of disco revival. And it is very kinetic, with lots of bodies in constant motion, if not clambering, and a great deal of multimedia information, as if caroming.

As the melodrama plays out onstage, projections of archival footage, text and live feeds surround the theater with hectic stimuli to signal a documentary effect as well as a pastiche. And more, the foci are dispersed, as actors and segments of the audience wander and platforms on which dancers put forth their own visions like in some side altars, or club ledges, suddenly appear. The stagecraft is undoubtedly inventive and the mood is lively, but the discourse and the psychology are rather thin.

The music and lyrics by New Wave meister David Byrne and Big Beat stalwart Fat Boy Slim can be edgy in the way they mix techno and funk, like the piece titled “Please Don’t,” which evokes Imelda’s claim to global soft power and the place of the Philippines in the geopolitics of the ’70s. But the edge does not seem to carve deep into the entire effort, as it fails to stay with the trouble that is Imelda. It instead leapfrogs from stereotype to anachronism, from caricature to polemic.

On a closer look, though, such a quick-change rhythm may well be the play’s artistic form, opting for atmosphere rather than analysis. Which is not without its argument, only that the singing of Jacobs is shrill, almost without nuance, and in some parts insufferable. Without a complex voice holding the phantasmagoria together, a musical becomes merely a madhouse, or a string of line dances set to mainly prerecorded melodies that sound pretty staple like the titular “Here Lies Love” and “Child of the Philippines.”

Hysterical, morose

Sensitive to the news cycle, “Here Lies Love” makes reference in its final scenes to the karma of history repeating itself, with the election of Imelda’s son as President in 2022. This prompts the DJ/narrator to somberly speak of God writing straight with crooked lines, a phrase that becomes the hymn of the uprising that deposed the Marcos regime. At this point, the Filipino partisans in the audience would either sigh, gasp, or mute themselves.

The title “Here Lies Love” comes from Imelda herself, taken from an interview in Ramona Diaz’s documentary “Imelda” (2003). It is her epitaph and mantra, sealing her fantasy and gospel, even as she sings wistfully and desperately “Why Don’t You Love Me” as she is forced to leave her bastion and fade, temporarily, into ignominy.

The play is hysterical in depicting Imelda’s expulsion from Malacañang, when she struggles with the blinding light and deafening drone of an American aircraft descending on her. And it is morose in reenacting the funeral of Ninoy Aquino as if it were the parting of the Red Sea.

It is always tricky to spar or shadow-box with Imelda because she deftly, and intermittently, moves the narrative from the realm of facts to the realm of fiction, which becomes the basis of her belief and her propaganda. To temper this tendency, the play puts up the Ninoy Aquino character, at once a personal and political ploy to critique Imelda, but only to lapse into more mystifications of Ninoy himself and the misfortunes of the so-called 1986 revolution.

These notwithstanding, the production boldly offers up the vernacular details of Imelda’s life, with names, locations, and events presented without footnotes or any attempt to explain. It casually assumes that the audience, both Filipino and otherwise, is attuned to the lore, gossip, and the minutiae from the existing biographies of the formidable Kerima Polotan Tuvera, Carmen Navarro Pedrosa, and Beatriz Romualdez Francia.

What “Here Lies Love” finally lays bare is its complicated complicity with Imelda Marcos amid the plea by some to just stone her. It can neither entirely vilify her for the dictatorship nor completely exalt her for, well, the same. She is like a persistent syndrome, shaped by scarcity and insecurity, fed by Catholic guilt and American free enterprise. The unease between these polar impulses makes the musical possible, along with its right to party and its call for all to be party to all rights.

The lesson can thus be addressed to the public, too, pushing us over to the mosh pit of politics to come to terms with the thieving desire for the image and the substance of what it means, and what it takes, to be the star and slave for ourselves and for others. Here, love usually lies.

The author is professor of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines and deputy curator of the National Gallery Singapore.