Here Lies Love opens to rave reviews

Barely a week after the preview of the much-awaited musical Here Lies Love last Sept. 30, which he described in a Funfare interview as “a surreal experience,” Mark Bautista must now be heaving a huge sigh of relief over the rave reviews that followed the show’s formal opening of its four-month run (until January 2015) over the weekend at the National Theatre on London’s south side. Mark plays Pres. Ferdinand Marcos in it.

Critic Dominic Cavendish of The Telegraph gave the musical four stars (out of five), saying, “The show doesn’t quite grasp that holy grail of combining club-nite excitement with fully-engrossing theatre. But my goodness it comes close and what a way to launch the Dorfman…”

Formerly called the Cottesloe and renamed Dorfman Theatre (after Lloyd Dorfman, said to be the National Theatre’s stalwart donor), the auditorium venue is just perfect for the musical about former Imelda Marcos’ rise from her Leyte beginnings to being the Philippines’ most powerful woman as the First Lady. As Cavendish described it, “using effervescent mass of laser lights, pounding beats, psychedelic projections and bopping bodies on the dance floor,” the disco musical co-written by American singer-songwriter David Byrne and Brighton-based beat master Norman Cook (a.k.a. Fatboy Slim) premiered at New York’s Public Theater last year. So you just don’t sit pretty watching the show, you have to get on the beat by dancing from beginning to end.

Wrote Paul Taylor of The Independent, “The inescapable comparison is with Evita…” that is, Peron, wife of the Argentina strongman Juan Peron, who inspired a hit musical (with Madonna playing Evita in the movie version to Antonio Banderas’ Juan Peron).

“But (Here Lies Love) tackles its beauteous biographical subject in a very different style from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita,” observed Cavendish. “If there were a song for every one of the thousand-plus shoes of Imelda’s infamous collection, we’d be here ‘til Christmas. But though the 90-minute piece, directed by Alex Timbers, is packed with numbers (there’s a scant dialogue), it moves swiftly and succinctly through the essentials.”

Most of the praises were heaped on Fil-Australian actress Natalie Mendoza who plays Imelda Marcos.

Ian Shuttleworth of Financial Times, who gave the musical three stars, wrote, “Mendoza’s Imelda gets a number about being both the people’s star and their slave, which puts her squarely in the mould of other political divas from Marie Antoinette to Eva Peron.”

Also from Paul Taylor: “Natalie Mendoza in full-blooded voice is stunning at every stage of Imelda’s development, especially when the infidelity of Mark Bautista’s smugly sexy Ferdinand (cue to a factory-belt of identical blondes in black scanties) turns into the glazed, self-deceived icon who imagines that she is both star and slave to the people.”

Michael Billington of The Guardian wrote that he found himself “wanting to know more” about the Marcoses, adding, “we learn little about the US’s dubious role in supporting Marcos during his 20 years in power, not a lot about how people learned to live under Martial Law, and even less about who was finally responsible for (Sen. Ninoy) Aquino’s murder.”

Billington reserved his superlatives for Natalie whom he described as giving a stunning performance.

“She starts out as a simple girl in a print frock and visibly seems to harden as she becomes encased in even more extravagant costumes with shoulder pads like aeroplane wings. Mendoza holds the show together and is well supported by Mark Bautista as her husband, Dean John-Wilson as the white-suited Aquino and the best-looking ensemble I’ve seen in years.”

Stephen Dalton of The Hollywood Reporter: “Here Lies Love is hugely good fun, leaving no time to get bored in its all-singing, all-dancing, breathlessly rushed running time. But it inevitably favors surface spectacle over dramatic depth, offering surprisingly few psychological insights into its main character, and scant historical context on the Philippines.”

Henry Hitchings of Evening Standard: “Loud, vivid and more than faintly reminiscent of Evita, Here Lies Love is an intoxicating and technically incentive experience.”

Cavendish noted that Madame Imelda, who turned 85 last July 2, once said that she wanted “Here Lies Love” as her tombstone epitaph. “But this ‘disco-musical’ about her life has nothing of a funeral wake about it.”

There you are. If you can afford it and happen to watch the musical in London, don’t forget to bring your dancing shoes.

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