Home 
NEW YORK, United States—The musical Imelda, on its last week at an Off-Broadway theater and produced by the venerable Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, has as its secondary title, “A New Musical.”
Certainly it is new as this is its New York premiere. But new in terms of its approach to the subject? Hardly; not to those who have followed Imelda’s rise and fall—and rise again, it seems, if that wrongheaded tribute to her by the Cultural Center of the Philippines is any indication. (What could they have been smoking?) The creation of Sachi Oyama (book), Nathan Wang (music), and Aaron Coleman (lyrics) and directed by Tim Dang, Imelda examines the psychological arc of its eponymous subject’s life, from her ingénue Miss Tacloban days to her dramatic ascent as the wife of Ferdinand Marcos and equally dramatic and forced exit from Malacañang in 1986.
Accurate enough as far as that goes, but the psychological portrait achieved is sketchy. In many respects the musical provides little to no insight. At one point, Imelda, decrying the brutalities wreaked by martial law, tells Ferdinand the “ugliness” has to end. I looked on in disbelief. The scene buys completely into the delusional myth—one of many wrought by the Marcoses—that she genuinely cared for the poor. That would come as news to the great unwashed, whom she has spent her adult life distancing herself from. The musical winds up portraying her essentially as a victim, with its implicit appeal to our sympathy.
This is one lady neither I nor the country should cry for. I must confess it is extremely difficult for me to harbor any sympathy for an aging ex-beauty queen, pampered would-be czarina, and now purveyor of a jewelry line who lives in the very lap of luxury, and trumpets to all that she owns the country. There is some truth to what the musical proffers, but it is far from the only, or even the most important truth, about her and Ferdinand’s tenure as a manqué queen and king of a crippled kingdom.
And even that sliver of truth is conveyed in predictable, campy style. Of course there had to be a song about the shoes, with funny lines—“Why the thrills for my espadrilles …/ Talk of shoes. What a pain! I am here to entertain!”—but how utterly predictable! A down-at-the-heel kitschy number that no longer elicits uproarious or even modest laughter. I suppose there must be some irony in the way that Imelda is now seen: as some over-the-top figure known mainly for her shopping excesses and her skewed pronouncements, someone to laugh at, when she so very much wanted to be treated with respect and herself be seen as a figure of international prestige. (When one reads on the musical flyer that Imelda was “an ambitious woman who wanted to put her country as an equal player on the world stage,” one realizes how contemporary Philippine history has been glaringly, if not deliberately, misread.)
The public persona that is “Imelda,” on which this musical is mostly built—the lampoonable but likeable Imelda, in other words—gives the real Imelda a pass and largely absolves her of any complicity in the shipwrecking of the state she and Ferdinand hastily fled in 1986. Those were glorious late-February days, when an aroused citizenry had had enough of the conjugal dictators’ rapacious ways. Make no mistake: Imelda was a full-fledged partner in an enterprise that turned the national treasury into their personal piggy bank and increased significantly the country’s foreign debt; made a mockery of civil liberties; instituted crony capitalism as a lamentable, regular feature of governance; wasted millions of dollars on grandiose projects; and politicized the military, with disastrous results.
The luggage she brought to Hawaii contained by the way a gold crown and three tiaras of precious gems—now there’s a campy item worthy of note, plump with symbolic promise! The musical renders her as a tabula rasa, an Eliza to Marcos’s Professor Higgins—a one-note relationship. Mel Sagrado Maghuyop is all menacing sneers and glower while as Imelda Jaygee Macapugay is simultaneously effervescent, flaky, and sharp, with a Pollyanna attitude that grows more determined and grimmer as the bodies pile up. The relationship between Ninoy Aquino—Brian Jose is a dead-ringer—and Cory (Liz Casasola) is similarly flat.
All evidence pointed to a darker, more complicated relationship between Meldy and Ferdy: the musical alludes to this, when at one point she tells him that he, weakened by lupus, now needs her, but this promising opening is dropped almost as soon as it pops up. The characters do include a nuclear peasant family, a stand-in for the masses that serves a counterpoint to Imelda’s climb to the top: effective but unfortunately not milked for all its worth. The finale is surprisingly dark and on target, where Imelda defiantly proclaims “I am the Philippines!”—a clear reference to Louis XIV’s ‘L’etat, c’est moi!” This could have been the starting point of a richer, more layered musical—political cabaret that could have examined the corruption and the decadence of the Marcos era, with wit, camp, satire, and biting commentary, one the talented cast, I have no doubt, could have pulled off. Imelda pulls us in several directions, and never convincingly in one.
There is an interesting side story to this production, which illustrates the hold, real or imagined, Imelda is perceived to have, even from afar—like the omnipresent malevolent eye in Lord of the Rings. Last summer Pan Asian Rep’s founder and artistic director Tisa Chang invited me to lunch and asked me to write a short piece on the real Imelda, to be included in Playbill, the standard program given out in theaters. The piece didn’t necessarily have to relate to the musical. Nor could it, as I hadn’t seen the work or heard anything about it. I made it clear that I wasn’t a fan of Imelda, which she seemed not to have any problems with. Our convivial lunch ended with me agreeing to think about it and to let her know if I did in the end wish to write something. There was to be no fee of any kind, so this would be gratis.
I had written an account of Imelda’s 1990 New York trial, for a number of publications. She was eventually acquitted, on her birthday no less, leading her to quip that the verdict must have been a gift from the dead dictator ensconced in heaven (hope does spring eternal). I included a modified version for my book Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago. To my mind, it was a sober discussion of the trial, a summary of the background to the federal case against her, and some biographical context (Imelda’s that is). It wasn’t a diatribe, not a rant, nothing slanderous or libelous. No dish. I thought, Perfect! A musical on Imelda premiering in New York, accompanied by a piece on her New York trial (and tribulations). I promptly e-mailed Ms. Chang, offering the excerpt, but she must have gotten cold feet, for without even reading the material she nixed the very idea that she herself had proposed. She suggested that a piece on the 1990 trial would not be kosher. I protested, stating that this amounted to censorship; she denied that it was, adding that La Imelda and her family had been invited to come and watch the musical. Furthermore, the theater had an obligation to maintain an “even-handedness.” Ah! The cat was out of the bag. This was not going to be provocative theater, after all. I wondered, again, in an e-mail to Ms. Chang, why I had to worry about Mrs. Marcos’s feelings, when “she never worried about mine, or those of a whole nation that forced her to flee. And rest assured she won’t ever worry about yours.” I suppose Mrs. Marcos can sleep soundly, knowing that certain quarters in New York are ever protective of her armored psyche. Hark! I believe I hear someone in the distance singing a song about feelings…
