Power Plays

They both started out as poor girls from the provinces, entered politics through their husbands and developed celebrity-style fame as well as its attendant bad habits. They were both compulsively quotable and known, in the fashion of their day, for padded shoulders and immovable hair. There the similarities would seem to end between Ann Richards, the late, one-term Texas governor, and Imelda Marcos, the ousted first lady of the Philippines (still alive in Manila, though brutally separated from her prodigious shoe collection).

These two outsized figures are the subjects of two new productions in New York that are themselves as different as two shows can be. Here Lies Love, at the Public Theater in New York, is an immersive disco musical by David Byrne, the former frontman for the Talking Heads, and the D.J./producer Fatboy Slim. Ann, on the other hand, is a digressive, homespun, one-woman show written by and starring Holland Taylor (of countless television and film roles, most notably on “Two and a Half Men”).

Where Byrne is after strong, visceral impressions and broad strokes that sweep us along with them—in a rough analogue to the putative seductions of authoritarian glamour—Taylor is working in a more familiar vein: the solo impersonation/biography of a historical figure, delivered with the thinnest pretense that we are hearing her give a commencement speech.

Neither show is entirely successful, even on its own terms; but both are worthy efforts with their share of entertainment value and food for thought, in varying proportions. Both depict women who at first reluctantly, then wholeheartedly, seize the reins of power with all its gratifications and complications and discover their mission (or their self-justifying rationale, as the case may be) only in the doing of it. This is not just a matter of biographical coincidence; in this shared motion from second fiddle to first-chair violin, the lives of both women dramatize a huge generational shift.

Born just four years apart, they were both transitional figures, straddling the pre- and post-feminist generations. They began life assuming, as Ann puts it, that “taking care of my husband and my children was my profession,” but soon enough realized not only that they could do anything men could do but that they were needed at the wheel after feckless male leadership had driven their governments into a ditch. As Imelda (Ruthie Ann Miles) defiantly sings, her decrepit, philandering husband Ferdinand (Jose Llana) cedes her more and more power, “It takes a woman to do a man’s job.”

“Here Lies Love” has an ace in Byrne’s mostly exuberant score. In his Talking Heads prime, Byrne laid spiky guitar parts and bleating vocals over a driving, often jerking beat; but his music in the years since has acquired a lusher, more openhearted pop sound. Here his soaring, long-limbed melodies, stretched over Fatboy Slim’s busy, Latin-inflected beats, give off a potent sugar high reminiscent of Abba at their giddy best, and they account for most of the show’s pleasures. A talented, attractive cast of 13 singer/dancers, leaping on and off platforms and moving among the standing audience in a modular, club-like space, ac-count for the rest of the show’s considerable charms.

Charm is a liability, though, when “Here Lies Love” reaches for poignance or social critique. Lacking a real script, the show strains to fill in gaps in the narrative—with director Alex Timbers’s swirling staging, with busy projections, with snippets of actual audio recordings by the historical subjects themselves—and into these gaps fall huge, bleeding chunks of Filipino history and context. A strait-laced Benigno Aquino, popularly known as Ninoy (Conrad Ricamora), is on hand to decry the government’s corruption and call for reform; a bummed-out dirge lists some of the downsides of martial law; there is a snapshot moment depicting a protest riot. One song, a funeral lament gone haywire, successfully harnesses the score’s big beats to a fighting spirit, and the unexpected soft landing of the ending is near-perfectly calibrated. Elsewhere, though, “Here Lies Love” traffics in fizz and sensation, and that party vibe dooms the sober moments to feeling like buzzkills.

There is a buzzkill plum in the center of “Ann,” as well, though it is to the show’s credit—and to that of its colorful subject, honestly—that it largely transcends its sluggish, miscalculated midsection. Taylor, made up and accented in an eerie likeness of the salty, Lone-Star governor, opens and closes the show in an ostensible commencement speech addressed directly to us. Her material is so lip-smackingly good, and her connection with us so warm and genuine, that she nearly makes the case for Richards as an American original of quasi-Reaganesque stature—a liberal to a fault, no question, but with the kind of anecdotal facility, down-home common sense and crack comic timing that, as they did for Reagan, made her appealing across party lines as well as to her base, at least for a time.

But between these speech/narrative sections, we pay a visit to her gubernatorial office as she fields calls on a momentous day. She has to decide whether to stay the execution of a mentally disabled murderer; she needs to coax a text out of a reclusive speechwriter; and she’s trying to nail down her family’s Thanskgiving plans. Taylor gets as much mileage out of this stressful tedium as she can, but a little of this day-at-the-office shtick goes a long way.

And if Richards had some crossover appeal in her day, “Ann” is clearly preaching to the blue-state choir. With its applause lines about gun control and women’s rights, its call to public service and its closing song (John Lennon’s “Imagine”), the show often feels like a civic-religious service for Upper West Side New York liberals. But maybe the choir deserves a good sermon now and again.

What ultimately sticks about “Ann” is that, as the 2012 election proved, we are now largely living in an America she and others helped build. “We rung a bell that can’t be unrung,” she says of her advocacy for women and minorities in the electorate as much as in high office. No matter one’s politics, it is hard not to admire big-spirited, forward-looking politicians. In her role as governor, Ann Richards recognized a window of opportunity she could crack open for others as well as for herself.