Notes on Lea Salonga and on “Here Lies Love”

No debate — Lea is right to be wary of strangers. Her fans should not take it personally.

What IS debatable is the charge that she is a “Marcos apologist”, first raised in 2016 when BBM was contesting Leni’s win as VP, apparently based on her replies (in social media) regarding her “stand on the Marcoses”.

LEA. They have always been kind to me and my family. … I will not disrespect them. … If not for that part of my life (I sang a lot in the palace for foreign guests since I was 10 until I was 14) I probably wouldn’t have ever dreamed I could make it as a performer abroad. I can’t ever look back upon it with regret. If nothing else, every presentation showed how beautiful our fashions were, and how talented our artists were.  https://i.redd.it/dkfitkzqs, f11.jpg https://i.redd.it/dkfitkzqslf11.jpg 

Lea was simply speaking the truth of her personal experience of the Marcoses back in the early 80s. By the time she started  performing in the palace at age 10, she was already singing and acting on stage (The King and I, Annie (title role), The Sound of Music, atbp. with Repertory Philippines) and guesting on TV shows. No doubt her exposure to and participation in Imelda’s high-end affairs that were always world-class went a long way in preparing her for the Ms. Saigon auditions and playing the title role, no less, sa West End UK and Broadway NY. But does it mean she is blind to the abuses of the Marcos regime?

LEA. In celebrating the good, I don’t ignore the bad. The good and bad are part of the whole truth. The abuses should not ever be forgotten. … When you’re 10 and sheltered, you know what you know. And then you discover more as you grow. … I only learned more the older I got. As with everyone else. … I do not doubt the truth about the Martial Law experience for many of our countrymen. That would be spitting on history.  https://www.gmanetwork.com/entertainment/showbiznews/news/23075/read-lea-salongas-opinion-about-the-marcoses-create-buzz-online/story

Fast forward to a July 6 2023 Playbill interview with Lea in the run-up to the re-staging of David Byrne’s Imelda musical “Here Lies Love” that she co-produces and where she plays Ninoy Aquino’s mother Doña Aurora.

PLAYBILL. Salonga vividly remembers Aquino’s death, the news coverage of it in the Philippines as well as his face on all the magazines afterwards. As part of her research for the role, Salonga spoke to Aquino’s brother-in-law Ken Kashiwahara. “[Aurora] was the one who had to make the decision to have his body on display,” says Salonga. “So that left such an indelible mark on so many people, and then just sparked an awakening in many folks from home.”

Salonga was 15 [during the People Power Revolution] … she remembers her parents making food at home and packing it into containers. “I remember my dad driving out to send it to whoever he could reach. Just to keep people on the street,” recalls Salonga.

To play such an important figure of recent Filipino history, it’s a task that Salonga describes with a deep intake of breath and a deepening of her voice, “Ohhh! It’s a lot.”
 https://playbill.com/article/lea-salonga-and-arielle-jacobs-know-that-here-lies-love-is-controversial-but-they-stand-by-it

Unfortunately, “Here Lies Love” is said to be too kind to Imelda.

RUBEN CARRANZA. David Byrne’s attempt to humanize Imelda Marcos insults the impoverished people she and her family stole from. And because it is playing at a time when the Marcoses have lied their way back to power, ‘Here Lies Love’ will only reinforce those lies and serve, intentionally or not, the larger Marcos agenda of denying truth and revising the history of their dictatorship.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/theater/here-lies-love-background.html

GINA APOSTOL. The effect of Here Lies Love is comic, benumbing, discordant, enthralling. The disco ballads, oozing Imelda’s rags to riches tale, underline the damaged psyche that held a country in its hair-sprayed grip for 20 years. They’re songs of a broken party girl whose megalomania leads to vicious, unforgivable murder — effects of dictatorship. But after the mayhem, as we know, and as the play notes, Imelda remains beautifully coiffed, unjailed. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dancing-dictators/

LUIS FRANCIA.  Imelda actively took part in governing the country, and had been named by Ferdinand as his successor in the event of his death. Wags always said that the country had His and Hers governments. It was this and her attendant notoriety that drew Bryne’s attention in the first place. Beyond superficial nods to political events such as the declaration of martial law (“Order 1081”) and the imprisonment of Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino (“Seven Years”)–the Marcoses’ most celebrated political opponent, whose assassination in 1983 eventually led to the demise of the regime—there is no sense of the public and political context that shaped Imelda, a grievous omission that undercuts Here Lies Love’s attempt to investigate what as well as who made Imelda what she is.  https://web.archive.org/web/20220818071905/https://thefanzine.com/when-disco-was-the-soundtrack-to-martial-law-david-byrne-fatboy-slim-and-imelda-marcos/

ERIC GAMALINDA. One can only offer so much detail on the long and convoluted saga of the rise and fall of the Marcoses. But in a narrative of breakneck speed (90 minutes), Imelda becomes the true heroine: complex, flawed, and brought down by hubris — almost Grecian in her tragedy. During one number, when she sang, “It takes a woman to do a man’s job,” the audience actually exploded in applause.

In the end, as Imelda shrinks from the glare of helicopter lights overhead, you still see her as a victim of circumstance. Her final song, “Why Don’t You Love Me,” is the anguished bellow of a lost soul, unable to comprehend the fate handed to her, when all she wanted was to “spread love.” https://www.rappler.com/entertainment/theater/inventing-imelda-review-here-lies-love-broadway/

But all that’s on Byrne, not Lea.

That Lea plays not Imelda but Doña Aurora places her on the right side of history.

The next challenge is to bring “Here Lies Love” to Manila, where it all happened. To some extent, staging it in the U.S. is easy and safe: that audience will always see it from a certain distance. Staging it in Manila would open it, us, up to a different set of discussions, about our history and its telling, the personal and the political, and the role that culture plays in nation’s search for meaning.

Here lies the nation that gave birth to “Here Lies Love”. We are the audience it deserves. And with the Marcoses back in power, there is no better time than the present.