Acasio is playing Imelda Marcos in this entirely re-imagined production. She finds the light disco-pop score, which features music by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, makes the darkness of the story more accessible.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really hard to, you know, come in guns blazing with a really traumatic, painful thing,\u201d Acasio said. \u201cAnd to play it to the tune of this disco pop, we\u2019re able to kind of sneakily open up that conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n
A conversation she admits she never had growing up with her own immigrant parents.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy parents were there in the Philippines\u2026and in my family at least, which I have observed in a lot of other Filipino families, it may be a cultural thing that we don\u2019t talk about those really painful memories,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd so I didn\u2019t learn about all these events as a Filipino-American until I did this show.\u201d<\/p>\n
Josh Dela Cruz, who plays Aquino, had a similar experience. As a young actor, he thought being seen as ethnically ambiguous would be better for his career, but working with so many other Filipino performers in earlier versions of this show changed that.<\/p>\n
\u201cFilipinos who were so confident in who they were as people, as Americans, and where their culture came from, that was really important for me to embrace who I am,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was a place where I learned not just a lot about my profession, but a lot about myself as well, and my identity as a Filipino American.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
(Photo courtesy of Jeff Lorch)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
This production is directed by Snehal Desai, who is also the artistic director of the Center Theatre Group. Increasing AAPI storytelling on local stages has been a personal mission of his, and with Kim\u2019s Convenience set to open at the Ahmanson while Here Lies Love is still running at the Taper, he calls this a dream moment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just means a lot in terms of representation, visibility for our communities and also uplifting the diversity that makes LA the city that it is,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also an educational moment, or as Desai put it, \u201cjust the start of the conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n
He knows it\u2019s hard to tell an entire history in 90 minutes, so for those who want to learn more, there is a timeline posted outside the Taper.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I hope is that it leads to a curiosity of the greater context of what the revolution was like in the Philippines,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have so many folks who lived this history coming to see the show every night. We have cast members who either themselves left the Philippines or their family members were a part of the revolution. And so what we wanted to do with this timeline that we have outside, with all of the resources around the show, is provide a little more additional context.\u201d<\/p>\n
Acasio says having this story on this revered stage is \u201ccultural win,\u201d and finds the story \u2014 and the history behind it \u2014 even more relevant now than when it opened on Broadway.<\/p>\n
\u201cMartial law was declared in the Philippines for a very long time under the Marcos regime. There were media blackouts. It was an incredibly oppressive time for Filipinos,\u201d she explained. \u201cThere have been a lot of very moving comments at the stage door saying that it was healing for them and it allowed them to even talk about it with their children. That they were inspired, but more importantly, their children were inspired to learn more about what happened and to not let history repeat itself.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source spectrumnews1.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LOS ANGELES \u2014 There is a lot of history in and around the show \u201cHere Lies Love.\u201d The 90-minute musical tells the story of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, the authoritarian rule of the Marcos regime, and the People Power Revolution that sent them into exile.\u00a0 The show also made history […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2294206,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[22694,22220,22691,21741,21738,370368,71501],"class_list":["post-2294205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-app-arts-entertainment","tag-arts","tag-california","tag-entertainment","tag-news","tag-tara-lynn-wagner","tag-vod"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Here-Lies-Love-sets-dictatorship-to-a-disco-beat.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2294205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2294205"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2294205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2294207,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2294205\/revisions\/2294207"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2294206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2294205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2294205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2294205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}