Conrad Ricamora takes us through a first look at Here Lies Love and the first all-Filipino cast on Broadway
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Here Lies Love is ready to shake up Broadway — to a disco beat.
The show, which is based on a concept album by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, chronicles the life of Imelda Marcos and the unfolding of her life as first lady of the Philippines under the abusive Marcos regime.
It first premiered off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 2013, starring a then-unknown Conrad Ricamora (How to Get Away With Murder, The Resident), Jose Llana (The King and I), and Ruthie Ann Miles (currently starring in the Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd) as Imelda Marcos. In 2015, it played London. And in 2017, it proved a hit again, in Seattle, but Broadway always seemed an unlikely goal.
Billy Bustamante, Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman (2023) 'Here Lies Love' boasts an immersive set
That's because it's no run-of-the-mill biographical musical. Instead the show welcomes audiences into an immersive disco-club environment that uses a DJ and music to tell the story of Marcos' life. No proscenium with tiered seats to be seen.
And now, Here Lies Love is hitting Broadway, with previews beginning Saturday night and an official opening slated for July 20. The musical is breaking barriers, not just with its radical set and dance-club vibe, but for being the first-ever show on the Great White Way with an entirely Filipino cast, which includes Ricamora and Llana reprising their roles.
EW has your exclusive first look at the Broadway production, and we caught up with Ricamora about the show and why he's returning to the role of Ninoy Aquino for the third time in a decade.
Billy Bustamante, Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman (2023)
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You've been doing a lot of off-Broadway with Soft Power and Little Shop, but this is your first time back on Broadway since The King and I. How does it feel to be back in that mode?
CONRAD RICAMORA: It's super exciting. When I did King and I, it's at Lincoln Center, which is technically considered Broadway, but it's on the outskirts of the theater district. It's really exciting to be going down into Times Square every day for work and feeling that energy and feeling like people truly come from all over the world to see shows. Now we're a part of that and they're coming to see our show.
This is your third time doing Here Lies Love, after off-Broadway and Seattle. How much has your approach to the show and the role evolved since you first started your journey with it?
This time we have the benefit of having done it before and knowing that it works. The first workshop we did, we were just kind of like, "What is this? We have no idea what this is going to be, if it's going to be good." Having that confidence and then building on that confidence this time around has allowed us to deepen our understanding of the material. We were trying to figure out where we were entering and exiting before, in the previous incarnations. Now we can really fine-tune our own performances and dig into more research of the history behind these actual events.
Billy Bustamante, Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman (2023) Arielle Jacobs and Jose Llana in 'Here Lies Love'
What keeps you coming back to the show?
My dad was a single dad. He came over from the Philippines when he was 10 years old. He never talked to us much about the Philippines growing up. And then when I got this show 10 years ago, he opened up and started talking to my brother and me more about the Philippines and his time there and his childhood. This show is so personal to my life and to my own relationship with my dad. He's seen it 15 times. That's the driving force to me. A lot of times, when people immigrate here and try to assimilate, a lot of the stories and the culture of where they came from gets lost. This is part of my dad's history, and my history, and I get to learn it and get to be closer to my dad because of it.
Billy Bustamante, Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman (2023) Jose Llana in 'Here Lies Love'
You have been playing this part for 10 years now. How much does just being older and having more life experience under your belt impact your performance?
Well, I just got married.
Congratulations!
Thanks. Actually just this past Friday, I got married. [My character] Ninoy was married for a really long time and imprisoned for seven years, and being away from his family and his wife and all of those types of things that he experienced into his forties and fifties are things that I can relate to, that I couldn't relate to in my early thirties. And we did this show before the 2016 election, and the way that the world — it seemed like democracy was in a really precarious position. Doing the show after those events, and knowing that Ferdinand Marcos's son is the president of the Philippines now, all of these things that have taken place in 10 years, make this show so much more important than even when we did it 10 years ago.
Billy Bustamante, Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman (2023) The cast of 'Here Lies Love'
It's also really revolutionary in terms of staging and design. This is the first time a Broadway house is converting itself into this more immersive environment. You've done plenty of traditional stagings of things, so what is it like performing in a space like this?
It was the biggest learning experience a lot of time. I've done theater in the round before — and even doing The King and I, there's a thrust stage where you're surrounded by the audience. I've got a lot of experience of knowing that the audience is all around me and making sure to share the love during the performance with the entire theater. The show is so exciting, and seeing people when they enter the space, especially for that first number, and their jaws are dropping. Seeing how people get caught up — because it is so immersive, they get swept up by the energy of the show — makes it easy to perform the show, because you feel the audience. The energy is palpable coming off of them. That makes the dynamics of the show and the staging of the show really easy, because you can feel the audience around you.
Billy Bustamante, Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman (2023) Arielle Jacobs in 'Here Lies Love'
Many houses both in New York and around the country are not necessarily built for that, but do you hope that it's an approach that more productions start to take?
If it serves the purpose of the story and the concept of the story, I definitely think that we should keep pushing the boundary of what theater is and challenging audiences and implicating audiences. There's no better way to implicate an audience than getting them involved in the action, which we do. For future productions of any show, it's so exciting to let people see that they can think outside of the box and it can be successful.
Ruthie Ann Miles was your original Imelda. She's currently doing double duty on Broadway between The Light in the Piazza and Sweeney Todd. Do you wish she was doing triple duty?
I love Ruthie so much, and it was so special to have created the show in its initial stages with her. Sharing the stage with her as many times as I did, not only in this, but also in The King and I, [was amazing]. But this feels like a very new chapter, and Arielle [Jacobs] is bringing something completely different. It's so exciting to watch her grow and make choices that are really exciting and dynamic and challenging me and keeping me on my toes. It's easy when you've done a show before to be in a pattern and a comfortable track. I feel lucky to be creating it again with a new person playing Imelda.
Billy Bustamante, Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman (2023) Moses Villarama in 'Here Lies Love'
You mentioned how there is a member of the Marcos family in power again now, and there has been some criticism of the show from people who say it glorifies that regime. What is your response to that and its message now with these new political developments?
It's hard to even comment on people who write a comment on social media , and there's no nuance. It's trolls want to say something, and they probably most of the time haven't even seen the show. That's just a phenomenon in our world that's happening, and something we're all having to learn and adjust to and not try to not get caught up in. The responsibility is with all of us to learn the nuances of every single story that we're reading and not just two lines on a comment section under somebody's post.
But for people that do have concerns — I'd say this show is about how a country, a population, or an audience can get swept up into following an idol, and the consequences of that. I'm playing the revolutionary leader of the Philippines. The fact that that's not being taken into account with some people's comments, I stopped [paying attention]. Because it's like, "Oh, you don't care to have a dialogue or to actually even see the show, you're just reacting or you want to say something." There's nothing that anybody can do with that mindset. We all know and we highlight in the show how the Marcoses stole billions of dollars from their country. We're not glossing over any of that. That is a part of our show, as our the human rights abuses that happened during their time in power. When people are just seeing, "Oh, they're doing a show about Imelda Marcos. She's bad. We should boycott the show." It's like, You don't even know what the show is.
Billy Bustamante, Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman (2023) Lea Salonga and the cast of 'Here Lies Love'
What do you hope people ultimately learn or take away from the show after seeing it?
Well, I hope that they go online and research more about what happened. My experience of the show in the past is that people have had this cognitive dissonance at the end of the show where they've been dancing, and it's been exciting to be under these lights and to see all these videos. But at the end of the show, to fully realize that they're implicated in getting swept up by following a charismatic person that did a lot of terrible things. Hopefully they can take that into the outside world and actually think critically about who they're following, the information they're getting, and whether or not those people are actually honest and have a real relationship to the truth.
This is the first all-Filipino cast on Broadway. How meaningful is that to be a part of that milestone?
It's super profound and very meaningful. The Philippines has been colonized by so many different countries. And a lot of times, in the United States, no one knows how to categorize us, or where to put us. Having a shared history with a group of people and a shared understanding and a shared process of learning about our history through doing this show has been really a bonding experience for all of us.
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