The Long Road to Broadway: 'Here Lies Love'

It is a commonplace among musical theater creators that the usual gestation period of a musical from conception to Broadway is about seven to eight years. Some, though, take much longer and pass through many way stations before arriving at a Broadway theater. Along the journey, artifacts of earlier productions sometimes make it into theater archives even before a Broadway production occurs. This is especially true of several musicals in the 2023–2024 Broadway season. This blog post is part of a series that examines several of those musicals.

David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s Here Lies Love, which opened on Broadway in July 2023, was originally conceived 19 years earlier in collaboration with a team led by director Marianne Weems of the Builders Association, an off-Broadway theater company. As documented in the Builders Association records, the collaboration started in 2004 and continued up to Here Lies Love’s premiere as a semi-staged concert at the Adelaide Musical Festival in 2006. The Library’s collection of material from this first iteration includes early drafts of the lyrics and the script, preliminary designs, and a pre-lyric audio demo of the score from June 2005 on which a male voice (likely Byrne’s) sings nonsense syllables on top of his music. Following the first performance, Weems and Byrne parted ways, but given Weems’s contributions at the very early stages of the show, the two agreed that she would be credited in the program for every new production.

Although Weems is credited as a director and co-creator in early documents about the show, her contributions seem to have been primarily focused on the video elements. From the earliest days of the project, the creators wanted to use video projection to tell the story. Notes in preparation for a meeting with producer Jeffrey Seller include the talking point that video is to be used “not because it’s a geeky media tool, but because of the visual impact. It can heighten songs, make the performances more exciting and more intimate (live camera) and convey the club feel.”  Weems and her team conducted archival research to locate clips of the Marcoses and related scene-setting content (including disco material featured in a 2005 exhibition at the Library for the Performing Arts). A video preserved in the collection shows a still photograph of a proposed scenic design for the concert, with archival video projected on the backdrop of the stage while Byrne’s music plays. 

Following the premiere in Australia, an American version of the concert was presented at Carnegie Hall in 2007. Byrne first released the music on disc in a 2010 studio cast album featuring performances by pop stars like Cyndi Lauper and Tori Amos. The first fully staged version opened at the Public Theater in 2013 and then, unusually for a show at the Public, returned the following year for an open-ended run (Public Theater productions generally have a limited run, then move on to other venues if there is demand). But the immersive nature of the show made it difficult to find another venue (though the Public’s artistic director Oskar Eustis and his team did try). The show closed in early 2015 after a run of about nine months, though during that time a new production opened at the National Theatre in London.  

Another production opened at the Seattle Rep in 2017, but it took almost 20 years in total before the show opened on Broadway. In 2014, Broadway’s small and immersive theater-friendly Circle in the Square Theater was available, but Eustis felt “tearing up the theater to accommodate the design would be prohibitively expensive.” The producers of the 2023 production decided that the expense was worth it, and in a gamble of the “go big or go home” variety, gutted Broadway’s second largest house, the Broadway Theater (the largest house, the Gershwin, was occupied by Wicked, which showed no signs of leaving).

Although the gamble was ultimately commercially unsuccessful, it did produce an extraordinary theater experience. Audiences could join the party on the orchestra/stage level of the theater (as in the earlier incarnations) or watch from high above as the Marcos regime and the other politicians in the musical bent the crowds (including the audience) to their will. A video of this production was captured by the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and is now available to view on site with a Library card.