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David Byrne and Norman Cook, a.k.a. Fatboy Slim, are an odd couple to begin with: one an ex-Talking Head and lateral-thinking pop singer, the other a star club DJ and dance-music producer. So the news that the two were collaborating on a disco musical about the life of Imelda Marcos, the widow of Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, was something of a head-scratcher. Peculiarity, though, is Byrne's specialty, and the recorded version of Here Lies Love is a winning twist on the "album musical" tradition. Twenty-two different singers (including the likes of Tori Amos...
...Imelda's particular bubble world. Here Lies Love was first performed in concert in 2006; Byrne had initially hoped to stage it in dance clubs. "In those days, there were these giant mega-clubs in warehouses," he says, "and I thought: what if you put a little stage at one end with a video screen, and you had a series of songs that told a story with an emotional arc to it? When you were there, you'd be dancing and drinking and God knows what, but something would be imparted beyond just the arc of a DJ set. That...
...danced to at New York discothques a few decades earlier. "Ladies in Blue," a tribute to the pill-popping entourage that surrounded the "Iron Butterfly," as she was known, recalls the cooing stomp of ABBA; Kate Pierson of the B-52s belts "The Whole Man" as if it's one of her own hits. "The text on that one is almost one hundred percent taken from one of Imelda's wackier speeches," Byrne says. "She got into her own kind of cosmology where binary code, zeroes and ones, would turn into flowers and trees and heart shapes...
...Marcos era for a year before he and Cook started writing Here Lies Love, and he's still digging up material for a potential stage incarnation. "I just found a speech that Benigno Aquino made, specifically attacking Imelda," he says. "I thought 'ooh, that could be good.'" The one thing he deliberately didn't look into is another show that got its start as an album musical: "I made a point not to see Evita. I do know that they're both rags-to-riches, or rags-to-figurehead-of-a-country, stories. But beyond that I don't know...
...poll conducted by Haifa University and released last month, he won the title of "most corrupt Prime Minister" in Israeli history by a landslide, with 52% of the vote. "I don't see any chance of him coming back into politics," says Raviv Drucker, a top political commentator on one of Israel's main television channels. Whatever the outcome of his legal problems, Olmert has already come to symbolize a generation of politicians who eschewed the abstemious ways of Israel's founding leaders and enriched themselves at a time of unprecedented security and prosperity, failing to address the deeper problems...