Explore the Immersive World of Here Lies Love with Scenic Designer David Korins

When audiences file into the Broadway Theatre for Here Lies Love, the disco-pop musical with a score by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, there’s nothing that looks or feels like they’re in a Broadway theater.

“It's disorienting, right?” scenic designer David Korins told Broadway.com Managing Editor Beth Stevens, leading a tour of the space. “When you walk in downstairs, we have literally taken out all of the seats, the orchestra—it's all gone. If you're traditionally used to getting a Playbill and walking to a little red seat, that whole experience is gone.”

Here Lies Love tells the story of the rise and fall of Imelda Marcos, the former First Lady of the Philippines, by transporting audiences to a flashy nightclub, replete with disco ball, dance floor and all-round party atmosphere.

It fell to the three-time Tony-nominated designer to transform the 1,700-ish-seat auditorium, which opened in 1924, into the Millennium Club. “Honestly, this is the most complex and for sure hardest project I've ever worked on Broadway,” said Korins, whose designer credits include the Academy Awards as well as Broadway's Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, Misery, Beetlejuice and many more. “It makes Beetlejuice look kind of simple.” For that show, Korins designed an ever-mutating set with a multitude of special effects. “To that point, that was the hardest and most complicated thing I had done. This is like that on steroids.” He added, “There's probably 10,000 hours of conversations with architects and with engineers before you even start to think about scenery.”

Korins describes the audience’s experience of entering the world of Here Lies Love as an “amazing revelation of space,” akin to Alice going down the rabbit hole. “It’s unlike anything you've ever seen on Broadway, literally.” The show involves around 38 different floor plan configurations, he said, each of which had to be individually permitted with the City of New York.

Here Lies Love is not an actual nightclub. It has the bones of a traditional Broadway musical, and most audience members—800 out of 1,100—are sitting down. “There's definitely a place for you,” Korins said.

The immersiveness, though, serves what Korins describes as the “great switcheroo” of the show. “We are presenting like a nightclub in this amazing, showy, extraordinary first-of-its-kind presentation. But then what comes out of the Trojan horse is an incredibly important piece of American and Filipino history.”

Audience members who play the role of nightclub revelers and the Marcoses’ wedding guests feel complicit when the story takes a darker turn. In Korins’ words: “You're part of the craft.”