Musical ‘Here Lies Love’ to close on Broadway due to low ticket sales
NEW YORK — Broadway audiences didn’t seem to have too much affection for “Here Lies Love.”
The Broadway musical conceived by Talking Heads mastermind David Byrne and Fatboy Slim will play its final performance at the Broadway Theatre on Nov. 26. The show, which began June 17, will have played 33 previews and 149 regular performances.
The immersive, disco-inspired theatrical work focuses on the rise and fall of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, who was married to dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
According to The Washington Post, the production — which reconstructed the 99-year-old venue to remove the orchestra seating and replace it with a dance floor — cost about $700,000 per week, which exceeded its weekly box office receipts of $500,000 to $620,000.
“When we started this journey to bring this bold and original work to Broadway, we asked ourselves: Can anyone produce on Broadway in a new way?” producers said in a statement.
“We have learned a great deal about the answers to those questions,” they added. “Yes, new ways can work. Artistic excellence can be achieved. But the reality is, succeeding on Broadway means not only producing excellent work with artistic merit — it also means creating the audience for it.”
Originally created as a concept album in 2010, the “Here Lies Love” stage adaptation won raves off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 2013. It’s also played in London and Seattle.
Featuring the first all-Filipino cast to perform on Broadway — including Arielle Jacobs, Jose Llana and “How to Get Away with Murder” star Conrad Ricamora — “Here Lies Love” garnered critical acclaim at Broadway’s largest theater, which allowed audience members to experience the action as it happened — on the dance floor.
In his New York Daily News review, theater critic Chris Jones said the show was “artful as it is radically inventive” and pointed out that Alex Timbers’ conceptual staging was “a truly fabulous piece of visual theater in how it fuses archival images and audio of the real couple, live video feeds, and Annie-B Parson’s choreography.”
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