“Here Lies Love,” David Byrne’s electro-pop musical about Imelda Marcos, is an unlikely mix of morality play and G-rated rave.
The first thing that strikes you at “Here Lies Love,” David Byrne’s participatory pop musical about Imelda Marcos, is a color. As befits the summer of “Barbie,” the entire Broadway Theatre seems to have been submerged in a grenadine cocktail: pink L.E.D.s in the lobby’s chandeliers saturate the white plasterwork, and, farther inside, the space has been reconfigured into a huge warehouse-style disco, pulsing with fuchsia and purple neon.
Kleptocracy requires scrupulous image management, and Imelda excelled at playing the provincial sweetheart and the glamorous ambassador, as power demanded. Imelda in “Love” occasionally looks like an old-model Tyrant Barbie: Jacobs changes clothes constantly, and she’s exquisite in terno dresses with high butterfly shoulders.
Reprising their roles from the Public production, both leading men have worked out ways to be uninhibited in the show while commenting wryly on it. Ricamora makes a virtue of his character’s hieratic flatness by compressing his voice into a Byrne-like drone, and Llana exaggerates a honeyed sensuality, letting his performance rot a little in the heat.
There’s a type of spectacle that operates at the other end of the spectrum: tiny instead of grand, intimate instead of impressive. For a just closed, sold-out-before-you-heard-about-it production of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” only forty people could squeeze into the Chelsea loft where it was performed.
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