David Byrne Launches Musical For People Who Hate Musicals

Talking Heads frontman David Byrne is hoping to attract a crowd that hates musical theatre to his new musical that will open as part of Sydney's Vivid Festival next year. 

Nine years in the making, Here Lies Love was introduced to assembled media in Sydney today by Byrne himself, who is in the country to oversee auditions for the May production. The story follows the rise and fall of the infamous Imelda Marcos, the former First Lady of the Philippines, and the two men in her life, husband Ferdinand Marcos and opposition leader/former sweetheart Benino Aquino.

“Musical theatre wasn’t really my thing," Byrne said today. "My thing was kind of a punk thing, but it was kind of like, we want to overthrow this and come up with something completely new, a completely different way of doing this that will appeal both to an audience that goes to musical and to an audience that hates them. We wanna bring in an audience that hates musicals!”

Produced in Australia by theatre veteran Robert Rigby of Newtheatricals (Jersey Boys, Rock Of Ages) Here Lies Love will be housed in a temporary pop-up 550 capacity theatre space made out of old shipping containers. 

“You’re entering a dance club,” Byrne said, “and you’re getting a narrative through the music and the acting that takes place all around you, and you’re the audience in the middle. You get all the information from the songs… some of it. The video gives some – you get someone’s name or a date, that sort of thing. 

"And sometimes, a lot of the staging that [director] Alex Timbers did really tells you the relationship between people, their emotional reaction to one another.”

Byrne said he chose the story in part because "I'm old enough to remember Madame Marcos as a larger-than-life figure – she’s still alive; she’s back in politics in the Philippines. So she was always there, but I didn’t want to deal with her [much mocked obsession with] shoes and all that kind of stuff. 

"I did hear that at one point, she installed a mirror ball in her New York townhouse, effectively turning one floor of the building into a disco, and she used to go out to a lot of the dance clubs and she converted the roof of the [Presidential] palace in Manila into a dance club.

“So I thought, I love music, but this woman really has it going all the time [another chuckle] and I thought it is the soundtrack to her life. So maybe, if there’s a story in her life beyond just the rise and fall and all that, if there’s something a little bit more interesting than that, then maybe it should be told with the music that she already surrounds herself with. And I like that music. I’m familiar with it, I can do it a little bit, I can get some help from Norman ‘Fatboy Slim’ [Cook] and then later, help from Alex Timbers."

Here Lies Love will open in May 2015 as part of Sydney’s Vivid Festival.