Newsmaker

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Alex Timbers ’01: sympathy for Imelda

By Carole Bass ’83, ’97MSL | 12:24pm April 11 2013

Wasn’t it enough to direct a satirical Scientology pageant for children? Or President Harding is a Rock Star, in which the Teapot Dome chief executive is “danced to death by a giant crab”?

Of course not.

Alex Timbers ’01, Tony-nominated cowriter and director of the rock musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, has now teamed up with ex–Talking Head David Byrne on a disco musical about Imelda Marcos. Here Lies Love (apparently the preferred epitaph of the Filipina ex-dictator’s wife) is “a show for the A.D.D. generation,” Timbers tells Vogue: “all the elements—music, lyrics, dance, staging, lights, video—collide,” with the audience right in the middle. The show, which doesn’t even mention Marcos’s notorious shoe collection, is playing at New York’s Public Theater through May 19.

The “dazzlingly gifted” Timbers is the “perfect collaborator” for Byrne, Vogue says. He’s also extraordinarily busy: in September, he’ll direct the new musical The Last Goodbye, a Romeo and Juliet spinoff drawing on the songs of Jeff Buckley. And if that’s not enough of the Bard, Disney has signed Timbers to direct a musical film adaptation of an unspecified Shakespeare play. 

Filed under Alex Timbers, David Byrne, Imelda Marcos
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