11/22/2023 0 Comments Our journey together![]() ![]() “Sometimes it feels like I never left, I know this labyrinth so well,” Salonga muses, thinking back on her “Saigon” salad days here. ![]() 13 (and again later in the run, she hopes) as Aurora Aquino, the grieving mother of a slain opposition leader in the Phillipines. Now she’s back, serving as one of a host of Filipino co-producers on the show but, more importantly for those waiting outside, taking on a small but crucial and climactic role through Aug. This is the same theater where she first found fame starring in “Miss Saigon” on and off again over a 10-year period beginning in 1991. Sitting on a plush couch in the mezzanine lobby of the Broadway Theatre just before the audience is let in for a Thursday night preview shortly before opening night, musical-theater legend Lea Salonga is having more than slight déjà vu. “Life During Martial Law” could be an alternate title for the show, which asks the musical question: Does real democracy stand a chance, if old-school authoritarianism has a good beat and you can dance to it? Not in a show that, beyond the bopping, tells a story of how easily democracy can turn into dictatorship (and, through peaceful revolution), back again, as viewed through the prism of the eventually dictatorial regime of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in the Philippines. Or, at least, it has been transformed into a reasonable facsimile of one, with the audience on the floor standing, shifting and swaying, and occasionally even dancing, in an immersive experience the likes of which Broadway has rarely if ever seen.īut the “fooling around” -no, that part still doesn’t apply. You remember the famous Talking Heads song with the lyrical hook, “This ain’t no disco…”? Part of the mission of the producers of “ Here Lies Love,” a stage musical created by David Byrne, is to let audiences know that the Broadway Theatre in Times Square is a disco. ![]()
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