#plus i saw some weirdo in the here lies love tag posting uwu cute picrews of imelda marcos and that. THAT made me very upset.

[fuckmywholeactuallife]

just saw Here Lies Love on Broadway and I have…complicated feelings about it?

One one hand. There was an insane euphoria of seeing a 100% Filipino cast. Playing Filipino people, too! Not just…oh we have a Vietnamese/Japanese/Chinese character, let’s cast a Filipino bc they’re the only Asians whose parents let them go into theater. And as a fil-am actor, that was very cool!

On the other hand of course is uh. Um. Imelda Marcos is still…very much alive. And the Marcos family is still very much influencing the government of the Philippines. And making her into an Evita story isn’t even accurate? Plus, the music/lyrics were written by two white (British!) guys and it shows.

HOWEVER I will say the production design is a huge part of the messaging of the show. HUGE. while the marcos are saying one thing, the projections and video screens are very much showing another. Death tolls, statistics about their wealth, their cronyism, archival footage comparing the Marcos’ wealth to the average Filipino standard of living, images of the people power revolution, etc etc.

Plus the acoustic song at the end which was composed of real text from revolutionaries contrasted so well with the huge bombastic disco style of the rest of the musical. Idk how to explain it exactly but it really felt like for the past 90 minutes of the show we DID get swept up in the Marcos propaganda machine. The dancing and the lights and the moving set pieces— the whole thing was designed to (imo) really get you caught up in the glamour of it all in the same way fascism promises you big things! things they way YOU want them! And before you’re really aware of it, you are dancing next to war criminals. The end song and the mural reveal felt very tonally different than the rest of the show.

However, I just…think there wasn’t enough THERE there, iykwim. The actual summary of the politics and events is minimal at best, if not outright fabricating some things (she did NOT grow up poor??? Her literal WIKIPEDIA says so. you wrote a whole musical and didn’t do your research??), they really toned down Imelda’s actual role as a dictator, shoving most of that responsibility off on her husband, like she didn’t run the country into the ground all on her own while he was ill, and seriously minimizes how corrupt and evil she was all on her own.

To me, Here Lies Love felt a lot like another Miss Saigon in that it took a huge historical event that devastated thousands of people and still has repercussions to this DAY, and made it sweet and palatable to a western audience. Then slapped a little “fascism bad, defend democracy uwu” moral on at the end. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#personal #here lies love #idk! I really enjoyed it in the moment and then I sat with it more #and sat with their portrayals of these REAL DICTATORS who KILLED THOUSANDS #and the ick started growing #plus i saw some weirdo in the here lies love tag posting uwu cute picrews of imelda marcos and that. THAT made me very upset.