INTERVIEW: Moses Villarama keeps the music thumping in Broadway’s ‘Here Lies Love’
Photo: Moses Villarama plays the DJ in Here Lies Love on Broadway. Photo courtesy of Billy Bustamante, Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman / Provided by BBB with permission.
There’s nothing quite like Here Lies Love, the musical from composers David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, director Alex Timbers, and choreographer Annie-B Parson. The immersive show, which is currently running at the Broadway Theatre in New York City, tells the story of the rise and fall of the Filipino leader Imelda Marcos (Arielle Jacobs), who was married to Ferdinand Marcos (Jose Llana). Together they enraptured the masses with their Kennedy-esque image and were darlings on the global scale, but their leadership quickly descended into dictatorship and repression, leaving a long legacy of hurt and pain in the Philippines.
Although the real-life story of the Marcoses is filled with anguish and sorrow, Here Lies Love tells its tale by leaning into the cultural landscape of the 1970s, and that means Byrne and Fatboy Slim populate the score with disco beats and thumping bass music. At first, the audience has a blast at the Broadway Theatre, falling in love with how the space has been transformed into a discotheque. Many of the patrons even stand on a dance floor for the full duration of the 90-minute show, but then the fun and good times are smashed to the ground by the uptick in authoritarianism and the squashing of free speech. Suddenly, New York theatergoers are left asking themselves a difficult question: Have they been witness to unchecked power and done nothing but dance the night away?
This profound, powerful exposé is anything but typical, and that’s why it has been welcomed to the Big Apple with such open arms. Here Lies Love oozes with uniqueness and unconventionality. One of the nontraditional aspects of the show is the presence of a DJ at the center of the action. Sitting on the mezzanine level, looking down at the throbbing dance floor and the dramatic action unfolding on the movable stage is Moses Villarama, who keeps the beats thumping and serves as a conduit between today’s assembled crowd and the Philippines of yesteryear.
“It’s been such a surreal and incredible milestone in my career,” Villarama said in a recent phone interview. “I’m Filipino, like the rest of the cast, and this is just something that doesn’t happen often in my career. To do it on this stage and with these people — David Byrne, Alex Timbers and Annie-B Parson — it’s just incredible, so I’m over the moon.”
Villarama, who was recently featured in the show Cambodian Rock Band, first saw Here Lies Love when it premiered at the Public Theater a few years ago. This helped him understand what Byrne and company wanted to accomplish with the story of the Marcoses because, at first, it takes a lot to buy into the idea that this immersive staging will work.
“I had a sense of what the job entailed,” he said. “The part that I was still wrapping my mind around when I first read it, when I first got the audition, was how we were going to transfer this to a bigger space. So at the Public Theater, they had the dance floor and then the seating around the sides, where you can sit and look down at the dance floor from above. But with the Broadway Theatre, there’s this entire mezzanine section that, truthfully, when I first got the audition, I wasn’t sure how it was going to work, and it really wasn’t until we got into the theater that I felt it. Once we started having audiences come in during dress rehearsals, then I really, truly felt, oh yeah, this is going to be really exciting for a lot of people up here.”
The actor is not a professional DJ, so he drew inspiration for the role from his many times of throwing parties for friends. During these personal functions, he would curate a playlist for two hours of partying, and he feels like those experiences have helped inform his character in Here Lies Love.
“For me, there are two things about DJ’ing that I think are really cool,” said Villarama, who was a company member for five years with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. “You can really create an experience over the course of an evening by curating what songs you play next and what order you put them in or how you mix them. Some of that is also improvisational, so it really depends on how the crowd is feeling. So if people are dancing on the floor, then you keep that momentum going, or if it feels like people are sitting off to the sides, you want to pull out a song that will get people dancing.”
Timbers, the director, and Villarama talked a lot about what this DJ character means to the overall narrative. They came to the conclusion that he’s the “dictator of the club.” He is the person who rules the space, and that’s how the actor conveys the part, as someone who demands (with a capital D) that people have fun, until they don’t.
“I was born in the Philippines,” Villarama said about his own heritage. “My dad was in the Navy. By that time [the time of the Marcoses reign], he was already a 10-year U.S. Navy man. So I was born on Subic Bay, and I lived there for three years before moving to the United States. But my parents didn’t really talk about the Marcoses. I’m old enough to have heard about it on the news. I used to visit the Philippines often, and so you’d hear about it. … For me, the thing that was most surprising was just how popular they were when Ferdinand was first elected. They were treated as the next John F. Kennedy type of figures in Southeast Asia. That was very fascinating to me, that an entire country could be so moved by these people and these rulers, who were seemingly well-intentioned and did great things at first, who morphed into these power-hungry despots.”
For Villarama, Here Lies Love is a lot more than just a show. Because this is not a typical night out on Broadway, when patrons sit back in comfortable seats and are generally passive to the action on the stage; instead, this musical asks its audience to be more attentive and participatory, and consider more of what’s happening in front of them.
“You’re in it,” the actor said. “You’re in the thick of the action, and we want you to have an experience. We want you to experience what it’s like to be swept up in these charismatic figures and then to have the rug pulled out from under you. I think that’s what makes it so unique and unlike any other show that you’ve ever seen before. Of course, if you don’t want to do the dance floor thing, there are traditional seats, but I think even those seats, you get such an immersive experience as well because you have actors who come up to the mezzanine to this balcony stage. And they could literally be singing 5 feet from you. … It’s pretty incredible, and that’s not true just for the front mezzanine, but the back mezzanine you have the same thing where actors are coming up there into the aisles onto these platforms that we have up there. And there are projection screens all the way around, so when I say at the beginning that every single person is part of the action, I really mean it. And I think that every audience member comes out with that same experience.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Here Lies Love, featuring Moses Villarama, is currently playing the Broadway Theatre in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
