He has admitted that, when singing Bowie's works, " I want to capture something of his essence but manage to bring my own as well." Er, one out of two isn't bad? "There's a starman waiting in the sky." Sophia Anne Caruso (Girl), Michael C Hall (Newton). An accomplished musical theatre actor who has appeared in productions of Cabaret and Chicago, he has the Thin White Duke's vibrato down pat and generally follows the original vocal stylings a tad too slavishly. Hall also struggles with making his mark here. The new arrangements don't do much to help the actors - Lennox in particular is asked to reach some punishing keys - and the musical's parting shot, a bland version of Heroes, sends us too gently into that good night. Few of the songs make a blind bit of difference to complementing, understanding or pushing forward what passes for a narrative. Nothing else." It is a shame then that Ziggy changed his mind, as his contribution to Lazarus is underwhelming. In 2013, his close friend and producer Tony Visconti said that "Bowie has found out what he wants to do: he wants to make records.
![lazarus musical lazarus musical](https://www.rheinpfalz.de/cms_media/module_img/10085/5042908_2_articledetail_dsc_0151_bearb.jpg)
The music will be the touchstone of this show and, on that front, fails quite spectacularly. Curiously absent, though, are songs which would have made perfect sense here like Rock 'n' Roll Suicide, Starman and Heaven's In Here. Featuring 17 live tracks in total, stone cold classics like The Man Who Sold The World, Life On Mars and Absolute Beginners are movingly sung alongside lesser-known tracks and three written especially for this musical. The Bowie-penned numbers go a little way to lifting Lazarus up to something approaching entertainment. The dialogue and plot feel woefully underwritten and, like the static that intermittently plays on a large screen, there is more noise than signal in Walsh's book. Strangely for a leading man, Hall is asked to spend around half the musical on stage but on the sidelines, a move which robs Lazarus of much of its emotional power. The story quickly disappears down a dark hole with too many scenes displaying too little in the way of sense or explanation: balloons are popped, a kabuki dancer appears, there are dives through spilled milk, and people we've barely been introduced to are suddenly stabbed to death. Image: Jan VersweyveldĪs the Gilbert to Bowie's Sullivan, Walsh's book is desperately dire, especially when compared to the acclaimed dynamism of Once. "I see baffled people." Sophia Anne Caruso (Girl) with Michael C Hall (Newton). Prepare to be baffled, and not in a good way.
![lazarus musical lazarus musical](https://www.musicalweb.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/lazarus_7.jpg)
It is this absence of clarity which is the most frustrating element of Lazarus. Neither Walsh's script nor Bowie's music makes clear whether this is all a booze-fuelled hallucination, a result of Newton's alien biology, a near-death experience or something else entirely. Elsewhere, a killer on the loose called Valentine (Michael Esper) draws ever closer to Newton. Soon, she is going out of her way to dress and look like Mary-Lou and an angelic muse (Sophia Anne Caruso) visits our resident alien promising him a way out of his personal hell. In his beige pyjamas and beige apartment, the gin-soaked Newton is living out a beige existence with only his assistant Elly (Kinky Boots' Amy Lennox) for company. Not only has he lost the wife and children he left behind on his home planet but also his human lover Mary-Lou.
![lazarus musical lazarus musical](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9IoMHWAaxhU/maxresdefault.jpg)
We meet the earth-bound extraterrestrial Newton (Dexter's Michael C Hall) attempting to dissolve his sorrows in neat alcohol. Bowie in the 1976 screen adaptation directed by Nicolas Roeg.įeaturing Krystina Alabado, Sophia Anne Caruso, Nicholas Christopher, Lynn Craig, Michael Esper, Michael C.It's inspired by Walter Tevis's The Man Who Fell To Earth - the source material for the film of the same name starring Bowie. Lazarus, inspired by the 1963 novel The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis, centers on the character of Thomas Newton, famously portrayed by Mr. Bowie as well as new arrangements of previously recorded songs. Lazarusfeatures songs specially composed for this production by Mr. Walsh makes his return to NYTW after the successful run of Once. Click here for more info and tickets.įollowing his revelatory production of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, the internationally acclaimed director Ivo van Hove returns to New York Theatre Workshop with a new production, Lazarus, by David Bowie and Enda Walsh. We’re so excited that LAZARUS will be playing the West End! We were honored to premiere it on the NYTW stage last winter and we’ll be cheering from the front row when it opens this fall.