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No shock then that probably the most expressive ingredient in “Right here Lies Love” (together with Clint Ramos’s costumes, which additionally transfer superbly) is the choreography by Annie-B Parson. Primarily based on small hand gestures and huge site visitors patterns, it suggests a fuller spectrum of human engagement than the in any other case narrowly centered and generally mechanical manufacturing achieves.
Is it fallacious to hunt that engagement extra absolutely? (Or as Imelda sings: “Is it a sin to like an excessive amount of?”) For many of its 90 intermission-less minutes, “Right here Lies Love” finesses the query, preferring to be handled as something — an artwork object, a dance social gathering — apart from what it’s. In that means, it recollects Byrne’s Broadway live performance “American Utopia,” on which Timbers and Parson additionally collaborated. However that present, which had no story, wanted solely to be glossy and pleasant to attain its factors.
“Right here Lies Love” bets that glamour could make up for narrative — or, moderately, that in a present in regards to the risks of political demagogy, glamour itself is the narrative. It’s a case of kind follows operate into the fireplace. We’re drawn to cultural and political pleasure in a lot the identical, usually harmful means.
Maybe the irony of creating a musical about that’s extra viscerally considerable down on the dance ground. It was for me on the Public, the place nearly everybody needed to stand and be a part of the story, not observers of it. (There have been solely 42 seats.) And maybe, 10 years later, with our personal politics trying much more just like the Marcoses’, nobody can afford to maintain a distance.
In any case, on Broadway, it’s not till the attractive final track, “God Attracts Straight,” that the fabric matches the motion in a means that reaches the balcony. Led by Moses Villarama, and primarily based on feedback by eyewitnesses to the peaceable 1986 revolution, it acknowledges the ethical superiority of its actual heroes — the Philippine individuals — in the one means a musical can: by giving it lovely voice. Lastly, it’s OK to applaud.
Right here Lies Love
On the Broadway Theater, Manhattan; herelieslovebroadway.com. Working time: 1 hour half-hour.
Evaluate: Dancing With Dictators in David Byrne’s ‘Right here Lies Love’
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