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Here lies love opens at mark taper forum in los angeles
Here Lies Love, the musical conceived by David Byrne, has opened at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. The production presents a reworked staging of the show’s immersive, dance-driven material while keeping most audience members seated. The creative team said the revision aims to retain the piece’s sensory urgency and historical clarity.
Directed by Snehal Desai, the staging is tailored to the Taper’s thrust stage and to Los Angeles’s sizeable Filipino community. The new configuration compresses movement into defined aisles and performance zones. That choice foregrounds choreography and design while limiting the roaming immersion associated with earlier productions.
The musical examines the life and political career of Imelda Marcos. The Los Angeles production maintains the show’s pop-infused score and multimedia elements designed to convey both spectacle and documentary detail. Creative elements seek to balance entertainment with historical context.
Artistic adjustments include altered traffic patterns for performers, tightened scene transitions and redesigned audience sightlines. These changes aim to preserve the show’s kinetic energy within a seated-audience format and to make key historical moments more legible.
The production opened at the Mark Taper Forum and continues its run at the same theatre. Future reviews and audience responses are likely to focus on how effectively the revised staging negotiates immersion, cultural specificity and historical narration.
Reworking immersion for a proscenium-influenced space
The Los Angeles production preserves the musical’s sung-through structure and brisk pacing while recalibrating audience engagement for a proscenium setting. Movement and choreography remain propulsive, but moments that previously relied on frontal immersion are reoriented toward staged sightlines and curated spectatorship.
Creative choices emphasize a near-documentary clarity in the portrayal of political events. Lighting, projected images and edited soundscapes frame historical material as evidence rather than spectacle. That framing reduces the participatory intensity of earlier stagings and invites viewers to observe rather than inhabit the action.
The reworking alters how cultural specificity is communicated. Intimate, body-to-body encounters are replaced by tighter ensemble patterns and clear visual markers that contextualize scenes for a larger auditorium. The result foregrounds narrative legibility and political detail over the raw, club-like immediacy of prior presentations.
These staging decisions shift the terms of audience response. Critics and patrons are likely to assess the production on its ability to balance energetic musical performance with sober historical narration, and on whether the proscenium adjustments preserve the work’s intended tensions between celebration and critique.
Adapting the staging for a fixed proscenium
The production team elected not to rebuild the auditorium. Instead, they adapted the performance model to the Taper’s rake seating and 739-seat scale.
The adaptation produces a hybrid format that retains much of the musical’s original momentum while changing how the crowd is engaged. Scenes that originally relied on full, club-style participation are reimagined to allow the audience to stand, move or interact in controlled intervals.
Artistic leaders say the choice preserves narrative clarity and the work’s tonal tensions between celebration and critique. The staging keeps sung-through pacing intact while accommodating the theatre’s fixed architecture.
The staging keeps sung-through pacing intact while accommodating the theatre’s fixed architecture. The creative team then rethought the opening world-building and how the public is placed into the story. Rather than recreating a continuous 1970s disco floor, the production adopts a format rooted in Filipino broadcast practice. It borrows elements from noontime variety television to position the audience as a studio crowd. That approach provides cultural specificity while retaining the piece’s oscillation between spectacle and political revelation.
Creative leadership and community-centered casting
Leadership emphasized collaboration with Filipino cultural advisers and local artists. Casting prioritized performers with community ties and lived experience relevant to the material. Directors and choreographers ran workshops with cast members to align performance style and cultural reference points. Production designers consulted community stakeholders to ensure visual details reflected authentic practices rather than stereotypes. The result is a creative framework that centers local knowledge while preserving the production’s theatrical ambitions.
The result is a creative framework that centers local knowledge while preserving the production’s theatrical ambitions.
Snehal Desai, the production director, has long sought to stage Here Lies Love. He worked with a predominantly Filipino creative team to reconfigure movement and audience placement within the venue.
The team designed brief moments of direct participation rather than sustained floorwide dancing. They also added a drag-queen host, styled as a variety-show emcee, to punctuate spoken beats amid a largely musical score.
Building on the addition of a drag-queen host, casting prioritized performers with ties to earlier stagings and to Los Angeles. Several company members had participated in previous concerts or workshops connected to the piece’s development. That continuity supports performers who already understand the score’s technical and emotional demands. The production’s design and musical leadership include Filipino artists and dramaturgs who supplied lived experience and historical context to the staging, reinforcing its grounding in community testimony.
Choreography and musical intensity
The choreography answers the score’s varied rhythms and sudden shifts. Ensemble work requires tight coordination and frequent changes in tempo. Movements range from percussive, syncopated phrases to extended, sustained passages that demand endurance. Dancers and singers share close spatial work, which heightens musical interplay and stage tension. Musical dynamics swing between intimate, quiet moments and powerful, full-band climaxes, testing vocal control and breath management throughout the company.
William Carlos Angulo amplified onstage movement to offset reduced audience dancing. The choreography is vigorous and tightly synchronized. It preserves the musical’s propulsive rhythms drawn from Byrne’s collaborations and the original concept album. Projections and dramaturgical inserts supply names, dates and background to anchor the audience in the historical facts threaded through the songs.
Politics, reception and cultural responsibility
The production’s explicit historical framing brings political themes to the fore. By pairing kinetic staging with documentary-style projections, the show makes its historical claims central to the performance. That choice clarifies context, but it also invites scrutiny over how events and figures are represented.
Critical response has focused on two linked questions: does the staging fairly reflect the historical record, and does it respect the communities whose stories it dramatizes? Reviewers and community observers have highlighted the production’s care in foregrounding facts. Some commentators nonetheless argue that theatrical compression can simplify complex histories.
Producers and creative staff have presented the dramaturgical inserts as an effort to balance entertainment with factual grounding. The approach shifts interpretive weight from audience participation to curated narrative. It also concentrates responsibility for historical framing on the creative team.
Ongoing discussion centers on cultural responsibility in adaptations that draw on real events and communities. Observers say the debate will likely shape responses to future stagings of politically charged musicals and to how creators integrate documentary material into theatrical form.
How the production speaks to contemporary politics
The production frames a historical narrative as a lens on present-day political dynamics. It dramatizes the ascent of Imelda Marcos alongside the movement known as People Power, inviting comparisons with current debates over populism and media influence.
Direct references to civic resistance are staged to foreground community agency rather than to lionize individual actors. The creative team deliberately emphasizes the collective arc that produces democratic pressure.
Los Angeles performances underscore the material’s local resonance. In a city with a large Filipino population, the themes of persuasion, spectacle and grassroots response carry particular weight.
The staging choices and editorial restraint suggest how future productions might handle politically charged source material. Observers say the approach offers a template for integrating documentary elements without diminishing civic complexity.
Following observers’ assessments, outreach and consultation influenced the presentation. Theatre staff and community advisers flagged risks that the staging might inadvertently glamorize authoritarian figures. The creative team adjusted characterization and framing to address those concerns while preserving dramatic tension.
Audience experience and broader takeaways
Early audiences described a complex emotional response that alternated between discomfort and admiration for collective action. Reviewers and consultation participants said the production foregrounds people’s organizing and resilience as its ethical anchor rather than elevating any single leader. Staging and script choices aim to clarify that civic agency, not personality cults, drives the narrative.
Staff and participants reported that post-performance talkbacks helped audiences process contested material. Critics noted the work offers a model for incorporating documentary elements without simplifying political realities. The production is positioned to prompt further public discussion about civic resilience and historical memory.
How the Los Angeles staging balances spectacle and instruction
The Los Angeles presentation preserves the musical’s high-energy soundtrack and rapid scene transitions while adding contextual framing intended to clarify historical and cultural stakes. The creative team adjusted design elements to suit a conventional theater without discarding the work’s central inquiry into authoritarianism, charisma and collective response.
The adaptation demonstrates that form can shift without erasing intent: choreographic drive and immersive moments remain, even as technical elements are recalibrated for a different venue. Viewers drawn by music, movement or politics encounter a production that aims to entertain and to prompt reflection on how art can interrogate power and how communal action can shape historical memory.
Observers will likely continue to evaluate whether this staging successfully balances spectacle with critical context and whether it advances public discussion about civic resilience and historical memory. The production is positioned to prompt further public discussion about civic resilience and historical memory.