Much-anticipated Broadway musical ‘Here Lies Love’ officially opens on July 20

Clint Ramos, award-winning costume designer and one of two Filipinos in the lead producing team, calls it “a watershed moment” for Filipinos in theatre.

“When Jose Antonio Vargas [Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author and a leading voice for the human rights immigrants)] and I were invited to be part of the lead producing team, this allowed us to advocate for the Filipino agenda,” Ramos said to Tatler. “For the first time, there is an all-Filipino cast on Broadway performing a Filipino story with an army of Filipino co-producers! That’s historic!”

Also lending his talent in costume design [Ramos took up his masters in design for stage and film from NYU School of Arts], he said he stayed true to the eras represented, which span from the early Forties when Imelda was a young girl in Leyte all the way to 1986, the start of her exile with her family. The challenge, however, is in the execution. For 90 minutes, the length of the show, she goes through 20 costumes. “There’s even a run of about seven costumes that required her not to leave the stage,” he related, adding, “I employed a lot of trickery to achieve this.”

Other Filipinos on the creative team are: J Oconer Navarro, music director; Gail Quintos, casting director; Billy Bustamante, assistant director; Sheryl Polancos, assistant stage manager; Giselle Töngi, cultural and community liaison.

Piquing the interest, and sometimes stoking a controversy, is the unique theatre form that Here Lies Love has always been identified with: standing-only orchestra. In a previous interview, Byrne commented: “I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be great if—as this piece would be principally composed of clubby dance music—one could experience it in a club setting? Could one bring a ‘story’ and a kind of theatre to the disco? Was that possible?” Reconfiguring a traditional theatre was actually a major reason why it took a while for this musical to make it on Broadway.

Here Lies Love was originally a music album by Byrne and Slim. “David developed the songs first. He even asked Filipino singer, Melody Butiu, to record a couple of songs into a karaoke track ‘cuz he knows how imbedded the karaoke culture is in the Philippines,” related Ramos who met Byrne in 2005 after grad school through the Filipino author Jessica Hagedorn. “He told me about wanting to write the Imelda story into music and invited me to do some costume designs. We really did not look at it as Broadway material but as something we just wanted to live because it was about pushing the boundary of the form. It is mainly using karaoke; live music, which we interpret as liberation and freedom, is used when applicable. Such as in that final moment played by live musicians [an acoustic guitar, a couple of drums]. It’s a beautiful moment.”

In 2011, Timbers joined to do a series of workshops. Then the album was adapted into a rock musical which did several runs: The Public Theater, 2013; UK’s Royal National Theatre, 2014-2015; and the Seattle Repertory Theatre in 2017.