Word: loving
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...have dubbed this generation the junior high generation. They love vampires, zombies, cartoons. They call home many times a day. Reading, even e-mail, is too demanding; they text people in the next room. Doesn't that sound like a 12-year-old to you? David Campbell Monroeville...
Some of the highlights of Here Lies Love echo the records Imelda might have danced to at New York discothques a few decades earlier. "Ladies in Blue," a tribute to the pill-popping entourage that surrounded the "Iron Butterfly," as she was known, recalls the cooing stomp of ABBA; Kate Pierson of the B-52s belts "The Whole Man" as if it's one of her own hits. "The text on that one is almost one hundred percent taken from one of Imelda's wackier speeches," Byrne says. "She got into her own kind of cosmology where binary code, zeroes...
Many of the lyrics on Here Lies Love, in fact, are adapted directly from the principal characters' own words. (The quotations from Imelda tend to be enormously self-aggrandizing, of course, but that's part of the fun.) The story arc follows Imelda from her troubled childhood through her whirlwind courtship with Ferdinand Marcos, her gradual assumption of political power and her break with Cumpas. By the last few songs, however, everything falls apart: following years of martial law and the assassination of Marcos' rival, Benigno Ninoy Aquino (who had briefly dated Imelda in their youth), the Philippines...
Byrne researched the Marcos era for a year before he and Cook started writing Here Lies Love, and he's still digging up material for a potential stage incarnation. "I just found a speech that Benigno Aquino made, specifically attacking Imelda," he says. "I thought 'ooh, that could be good.'" The one thing he deliberately didn't look into is another show that got its start as an album musical: "I made a point not to see Evita. I do know that they're both rags-to-riches, or rags-to-figurehead-of-a-country, stories. But beyond that...
...real-life Imelda Marcos, now 80, has recently tried to relaunch her political career, and Here Lies Love is, among other things, an attempt to explain her monomaniacal craving for power and respect: Byrne notes that he'd like listeners to "reluctantly empathize" with his version of her. "Audiences already have a certain amount of knowledge--it might be just the shoes and the money in the Swiss bank accounts. So I have to let people know what drove her to this, and to see if they can see things from her point of view. Which is not to excuse...