The Broadway Theatre has lately been cursed by a parade of the ghastly: in 2019 there was a lurching musical King Kong, then in 2020 Ivo van Hove’s strange production of West Side Story, in which much of the action was hidden so far away from the audience that we could only watch it on closed-circuit video. Following that came in 2022 a whispery, acrobat-infested circus-tinged stab at The Little Prince. You will understand my trepidation when I learned the space would next be lent to a disco musical about Imelda Marcos called Here Lies Love.
In the interest of rejuvenation, or exorcism, the interior has been totally overhauled: the orchestra seats have been yanked and replaced with a dance floor and a shoulder-high raised platform that, propeller-like, rotates around the floor, forcing the crowd to disperse around it. To the sides are other platforms for actors to pop in and out of. Above that are wraparound screens for video projections, and above that are catwalks that enable the performers to strut around the mezzanine upstairs. On several occasions actors were standing within three feet of my nose. Also, the entire audience is repeatedly exhorted by a deejay to get up and shimmy—a line dance here, a disco freestyle there. All of this defines hell for me, and so I hated every minute of the experience.
Or at least I tried to. So engaging is the story of Imelda Marcos (Arielle Jacobs), about whom I knew virtually nothing (I didn’t read the papers in the 1980s), and so well-crafted are the songs, by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, that I overlooked the let’s-party hullabaloo and found myself instantly captivated. Moreover, told in a single sprightly act of ninety-five minutes, the show is one of the fastest-moving musicals I’ve seen. In keeping with Broadway’s gradual reversal of many of its least appealing new fads, it’s the first musical I’ve been to in years that hasn’t sought to make a blundering point about “inclusion” by planting fat and/or ugly people in the chorus. Evidently Imelda’s glamorous and regal “brand” convinced the director Alex Timbers that he should honor it with a fetching and decked-out supporting cast.
Wittily enough, the Broadway Theatre also hosted the 1979–83 original run of Evita, a clear and obvious model for Here Lies Love.
Wittily enough, the Broadway Theatre also hosted the 1979–83 original run of Evita, a clear and obvious model for Here Lies Love. (There’s even a climactic balcony scene in which Imelda begs the crowds for their adoration.) The two shows have the same story: poor girl leverages her beauty to bed an up-and-coming political figure, makes a few unfortunate forays into fascism, becomes a worldwide celebrity, enrages the masses with increasingly dictatorial policies, and disappears, leaving a legacy of profoundly mixed feelings. Both sprinkle mischievous musical-theater fairy dust on what is essentially an opera. The main story difference is that whereas Imelda Marcos is still alive (she’s ninety-four) and wrote herself several unexpected epilogues (her son Ferdinand Jr., a.k.a. “Bongbong” or bbm, is today the president of the Philippines), Eva Perón died gloriously young at thirty-three. The main creative difference is that Evita’s lyrics, by Tim Rice, were snappy and clever, whereas Byrne’s are thuddingly banal and superficial, frequently reading like soap-opera dialogue (“I gave you my life, I gave you my time, what more could I do?”) or deliberate clichés (“a simple country girl who has a dream”).
The score is peppy throughout, though, mixing in Seventies-style ballads such as the title song with electronic, disco, and rock beats. Since the show is sung through, projected titles quickly supply needed information (such as the identity of Imelda’s loving nursemaid, Estrella, who gets jettisoned as her young charge climbs the social ladder and is movingly played by Melody Butiu). As a teen, Imelda dates a rising politician, Ninoy Aquino (Conrad Ricamora), whose democratic purity is indicated by his all-white costuming. She gets dumped, and personal revenge is as strong a motive with her as any political ideal. Ninoy becomes the leader of the Liberal Party as Imelda latches on to the dashing supposed war hero and rising politician Ferdinand Marcos (Jose Llana). As the first lady of the country in the 1960s, she gets derided for her free-spending, self-aggrandizing public projects, which are mirrored by her personal extravagance. With her husband declaring martial law, then being sidelined by illness, she becomes the de facto leader of the country and sets about becoming an international glamour girl, with projections showcasing photographs of her triumphant romps at Studio 54 (another in-joke: that edifice still stands, less than two blocks from the Broadway Theatre). But Ninoy’s annoying populist movement ramps up its protests, the conflict with him becomes increasingly bitter, and the show builds to a lovely emotional ballad, beautifully sung by Ninoy’s mother, Aurora. Yet another nifty resonance is the casting of this small but important role: She is Lea Salonga, herself a Filipina who achieved her greatest fame in the very same building when she starred in Miss Saigon in 1990. Salonga, as a teen, participated in the People Power Revolution that dogged the Marcoses.
The action rockets along through time and all over the theater.
Ricamora as Ninoy, Llana as Ferdinand, and most of all Jacobs as Imelda are dynamically appealing as the action rockets along through time and all over the theater. The show, which originally played at the Public Theater downtown in 2013 and was revived after Byrne proved a surprising word-of-mouth success on Broadway with his 2018 show American Utopia, glitz-bombs the audience. With the actors capering around the house, riding the moving part of the stage like a parade float, and merrily infiltrating the ticket-buyers (at one point I was surrounded by a dancing Muammar Gaddafi, Jimmy Carter, and Fidel Castro), it’s an audacious, head-spinning theatrical experience.
Pip-pip, tally-ho, and whose knickers are these? The time is ripe—is it ever not?—for a British sex farce, and a reasonably good American simulacrum will do. The Cottage (at the Helen Hayes Theater through October 29) is written and directed by Yanks—the author is the veteran playwright Sandy Rustin and the director is the former Seinfeld star Jason Alexander—but you’d guess either (or both) of them was born in Kensington in about 1895. Both Rustin and Alexander are making their Broadway debuts in their respective jobs, and they’ve done some merry work.
Knocking about from one amusingly contrived development to another, The Cottage takes as its inspiration Noël Coward plays such as Hay Fever, plus a touch of Oscar Wilde, and one can easily imagine Coward collaborators like David Niven or Rex Harrison playing the lead male role. The dashing philanderer Beau, played by Eric McCormack with a tight little mustache, spends much of the first act in a crimson dressing gown and socks with garters. As he enters, a towel he’s been using to wipe his neck disappears, whisked away to the rafters in an indication of the silliness of many such gags to come. (McCormack, a former star of the nbc sitcom Will & Grace, has followed another actor on that show, Sean Hayes, of Good Night, Oscar, into a lead role on Broadway this year.) Beau, who is obviously a cad and a two-timer if not a three-timer, is pitching woo to his blonde lover, Sylvia (Laura Bell Bundy), when the chaos commences. Beau’s pregnant wife, Marjorie (Lilli Cooper), shows up with her own lover in tow: Clarke (Alex Moffat), who is Beau’s brother. Many hurt feelings and recriminations ensue, although they don’t matter a great deal since both pairs of lovers seem content with the new circumstances. Matters are further entangled with the entrance of Dierdre (Dana Steingold) and Richard (Nehal Joshi), bringing to half a dozen the number of romantic participants who have either been married to, or had affairs with, at least two others in the room. Accusations fly. A murderous threat is much alluded to, and then appears, although in only an appropriately ridiculous way.
Stuffed animals (such as a late porcupine and a swordfish) are deployed as weapons.
The cast members, especially the arrogant McCormack and the bluff Moffat (who is best known for his impressions on Saturday Night Live), are in good form, and Alexander keeps things light and nimble with, for instance, a running gag (engineered by the prop supervisor Matthew Frew) about cigarettes and lighters appearing in incongruous places. (Paul Tate dePoo III, who sounds as though he should have been a character in the piece, designed the set, which is so richly detailed that it earned a round of applause at the performance I attended.) Entrances are marked with fanfares and sweeping gestures; stuffed animals (such as a late porcupine and a swordfish) are deployed as weapons. One character consumes an entire bottle of wine and confesses to a sordid secret; another suffers an extended bout of flatulence, which, in context, is quite funny. McCormack develops a hilarious habit of exiting tempestuously, only to reenter to steal a bow.
Solely in the second hour of a play that stretches on to a hundred and twenty minutes including intermission (it would have been wiser, in a dramatic sense, to limit the proceedings to ninety minutes with no intermission, although it was certainly more astute, in a selling-drinks-at-the-interval sense, to extend matters) does the lack of any particular goal start to drag the show down. Rustin seems to decide late that the work is actually about who will finally own the eponymous cottage now that its former owner, Beau and Clarke’s mother, has joined their father in the grave. The only truly contemporary, hence peculiar and unwelcome, element is a forced feminist bit that channels the tone of today’s bristling, ever-aggrieved progressive writer. In the end we’re meant to believe that what a woman really wants is wealth, not love; that she places little value on marriage or even committed companionship; and that, should she have any horizontal desires, she can simply fulfill them via casual rutting with the nearest hired hand. To say the least, it’s an untraditional finish to a play that is otherwise an uncannily accurate knockoff. Still, Rustin (best known for a stage adaptation of the movie Clue that is the single most-produced play in American high schools these days) and her cast otherwise consistently earn laughs in this country romp.
Anyone who has ever watched the summer blockbuster that created the summer blockbuster, Jaws, must have wondered: what might it have been like to spend time with Robert Shaw, whose performance as the obsessive shark-hunter Quint gave the movie its Ahab? Ian Shaw certainly wonders. Only five when he visited the set, and just eight when Robert died in 1978, the actor’s ninth child (out of ten) became a thespian and writer of no particular distinction. I’d never heard of him before, but at age fifty-three the younger Shaw has finally attracted some notice by playing his father on stage in the amusing trifle The Shark Is Broken. It’s a one-act, single-set three-hander that debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 2019, moved on to the West End, and is now at the John Golden Theatre through November 19.
With his hostile mutter and his withering glare, Robert Shaw was such a joy to watch in The Sting, The Battle of the Bulge, and A Man for All Seasons that simply bringing him back to life, which his son does beautifully, makes for an acceptable play. Together with the comedy writer Joseph Nixon, Ian Shaw has made Robert the focus of a piece that doesn’t have a lot of substance—it feels like the dramatization of a making-of article in Vanity Fair or Entertainment Weekly—but offers some laughs and a fond portrait of a brilliant but self-chastising actor.
As all movie buffs know, the shooting of Jaws was a disaster; making just his second theatrical feature, the twenty-seven-year-old director Steven Spielberg brashly insisted on shooting at sea (it was the first Hollywood picture so filmed) instead of in a studio water tank. The gamble led to repeated breakdowns of the mechanical sharks (which had not been tested in salt water), an ever-extended shooting schedule, and a massive cost overrun from the originally budgeted $3.5 million to $9 million. The three principal actors had lots of time to kill between takes while waiting for the technical folks to straighten out the various difficulties.
All in all, the humor is a bit like how one fights off a shark: directly on the nose.
Ian Shaw (who relied heavily on published articles and books rather than family recollections) has imagined some of the conversations that took place among the actors while they waited aboard the small boat where the climactic action of the film took place. Two conflicts provide the dramatic valence: man vs. man and man vs. himself. Principally the play is a comic feud (occasionally erupting into mild near-strangulation) between the domineering Robert and his younger, sillier, hyperventilating costar Richard Dreyfuss (Alex Brightman), who is alternately boastful and panicky about his career. Brightman, who became one of the most sought-after leading men on Broadway after laudable star turns in the musicals School of Rock and Beetlejuice, has a lot of fun playing up Dreyfuss’s twitchy neuroses, which contrast nicely with Ian/Robert Shaw’s rumbling gravitas. Dreyfuss dreams of working with Harold Pinter, several of whose plays Shaw had done; in response, Shaw twits this twit, logs some quality drinking time, glowers, and awaits a large paycheck. It is his opinion that the worse the movie is, the more money it will earn, and Shaw believes Jaws is going to be terrible. The third leading man, Roy Scheider (a mild Colin Donnell), is underwritten to the point of barely registering. He spends the play refereeing, talking about relaxing in the sun, and occasionally interjecting bits of trivia he comes across in the newspapers the summer Richard Nixon was to resign the presidency. A few elbow-in-ribs laugh lines get tossed about: “There will never be a more immoral president!” Har, har. Scheider (the only one of the three who went on to appear in Jaws 2) harrumphs, “If there’s a sequel, I won’t be in it!” All in all, the humor is a bit like how one fights off a shark: directly on the nose. Toward the end someone prophesies that Hollywood is becoming a factory for sequels and remakes and sequels to remakes and remakes of sequels. Amusing, but not exactly a fresh observation, and anyway not yet true in 1974.
More interesting than the quarrels between Shaw and Dreyfuss are the ones within Shaw.
More interesting than the quarrels between Shaw and Dreyfuss are the ones within Shaw; a ferocious drinker, he keeps bottles stashed all over the boat and punishes his liver as a sort of penance for making so much money in such an unmanly profession. Alone among the three, Shaw understands completely that the film’s only monologue—Quint’s speech about surviving the Japanese sinking of USS Indianapolis in shark-infested waters in the summer of 1945—is the dramatic foundation of the entire story. But after rewriting it himself to make it sound more like the words of a plainspoken old mariner and less like those of a Hollywood screenwriter (an uncredited John Milius reportedly wrote the first draft of the speech), he bungles it twice in the play, the second time while collapsing in a drunken puddle. This sets up a very obvious but highly satisfying climax, when Shaw finally nails the speech in the take preserved in the movie. Steven Spielberg, who doesn’t appear in the play but whose voice is simulated offstage, is satisfied, and so is the audience.
