"Here Lies Love': Imelda Marcos in New York

Beware of Alex Timbers. He's a dangerous director. He'll lure you down to Lower Manhattan's Public Theater with the seductive title of his new disco-style poporetta, Here Lies Love. There, he'll get you dancing, partying and having the time of your life to music by the rocker David Byrne, formerly frontman for the Talking Heads.

Only too late will you realize that, in doing so, you've become an accomplice to one of the 20th Century's most infamous political regimes. For Here Lies Love concerns the dramatic rise and fall of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, who reigned over the Philippines from 1969 to 1986.

For the first half of this production's wild 90-minute ride, Timbers makes you fall in love with a First Lady best remembered today for acquiring more than 1,000 pairs of shoes— not to mention at least 15 mink coats, 500 ball gowns and 1,000 handbags— while most of her country starved.

Talking about shoes: Wear sneakers and check your bags at the door, because this theater has no seats and you'll never, ever, sit down or stop moving. For this production, one of the venues of the Public Theater has been converted into a disco club"“ a long rectangular room featuring stages on either end, with moveable raised runways lining the sides and stretching down the center.

Cinderella meets Evita

As you enter, the disco ball shimmers, the music pounds, the colored strobe lights throb, and images of Imelda flash across giant screens mounted on all four walls. People are milling everywhere, and you go with the flow of it, moving with the crowd and gazing at the images above and around you.

Then the DJ perched high on the balcony calls out: "Welcome to Club Millennium— we're going to the Philippines!" As the music blasts and platforms turn, 13 performers strut out onto the runways and the show begins.

Mrs. Marcos's streamlined story— a simplistic blend of Cinderella, Eliza Doolittle, and Evita— is told in continuous music and song. It begins with a fantasy scene in the Filipino provinces, featuring an innocent little "country" flower named Imelda. A flock of damsels dance dreamily, dressed in chiffon and twirling white parasols.

Whirlwind courtship

The scene segues into a beauty pageant, where Imelda is crowned "the Rose of Tacloban" (and later "Miss Philippines"). "Here lies love," Imelda sings sweetly—a sentimental motif that turns desperate as the show goes on.

Platforms turn again, as we follow the upwardly mobile Imelda to Manila, where she works as a shop girl and singer, continuing her meteoric rise. She's swept off her feet by a political candidate named Ferdinand Marcos, who marries her after an 11-day whirlwind courtship. We dance at their wedding, of course, as if we don't know what's coming. (Sad to say, most of the audience doesn't.)

Dancers twirl, platforms whirl, and we dance through the '60s as the Marcoses campaign for Ferdinand's presidency, win it, serve two terms, and indulge in lavish excesses, like a fleet of yachts and a disco in the presidential palace. Dressed like Jackie Kennedy, Imelda wins hearts at home and abroad, her face featured on magazine covers all over the world.

Dancing with Arafat

Insatiable, Imelda dances on— now in a white Chanel coat, now in a white mink, a Martini in one hand and a vial of tranquilizers in another. She descends from the raised platform to walk among "her people"— the audience on the dance floor. After all, it's not only extravagance to which she's addicted"“ it's also the public's adulation.

While she dances abroad with Yassir Arafat and Ronald Reagan, at home students protest against the regime's greed, only to be met with police brutality. Ferdinand abolishes the free press and imprisons his opposition. Aquino, Marcos's most outspoken critic, is assassinated.

Suddenly, the disco music stops. It's 1986, the People Power Revolution erupts, and the Marcoses flee the Philippines to the deafening sounds of whirling helicopters. Stunned to silence, the audience is frozen in place. Two singers clad in rags emerge, to sing a bittersweet ballad of the country's newfound freedom and uncertain future.

One missing piece

The party is over. We file out of the theater, sobered after the orgy, guilty for our compliance in the Philippines' troubled past.

And yet, for all its clever exposition of the roots of tyranny, Here Lies Love omits one crucial element of the story: the present. And that element might very well change our view of this otherwise sensational show.

After a six-year exile, during which she was acquitted by an American court for various charges (including fraud and racketeering), Imelda Marcos returned to the country she and her late husband plunged into poverty, turmoil and revolution. Within a year, she made a bid for the presidency. She was subsequently elected to Congress from Leyte, her home province, in 1995. This month, at the age of 83, she was reelected to Congress for a second term.

Her own constituents, it appears, have forgotten Imelda Marcos's story. So what does that mean, Mr. Director? Does sensation trump substance? Should we just keep dancing?