There’s disappointing news for Bay Area fans of David Byrne and musicals. The American Conservatory Theater (ACT) has cancelled plans to stage Here Lies Love, the musical about Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos by Byrne and Fatboy Slim.
The show played to good reviews in 2013 and 2014 at the Public Theater in New York City and then in London, but ACT’s director says producing the show would be too expensive.
“Everybody here wanted to do it,” said ACT’s Interim Executive Director Peter Pastreich in a phone interview Wednesday morning. “But we were looking at a loss of between $800,000 and $1 million.”
The production would have cost about $2.5 million, Pastreich said, and though the company had hoped to raise an extra $250,000 in “special giving” to offset production costs, “we did not find patrons in the community,” Pastreich said, “who thought this was of sufficient interest, above and beyond normal fundraising.”