Swansong for the man who fell to EARTH
Nostalgic musical Lazarus brings The Thin White Duke back to life...
LET’S not pretend to be surprised that the David Bowie musical Lazarus is a teeny bit pretentious. That was certainly the view of many critics when it first appeared in London five years ago. But for those of us who were certified Spiders From Mars, back in the salad days of our misspent youth, it’s still required viewing.
I was certainly sorry to miss Ivo van Hove’s sell- out production when it transferred from New York to London’s King’s Cross Theatre in 2016.
So I leapt at the chance to watch this live recording, which has been released — on live-music website dice.fm — to coincide with Bowie’s birth and death days (today and Sunday, respectively).
Enda Walsh’s script, based on Walter Tevis’s novel The Man Who Fell To Earth, is about an extraterrestrial who came here seeking water to save his parched planet, but is now reduced to guzzling gin in his New York apartment, hoping to die but thwarted by memories of lost love.
And if that’s not mind-bending enough, our spaceman on the sauce is also visited by hallucinations of angels and demons, while a swivel-eyed psychotic killer, who’s loose on the streets of Manhattan, draws ever closer.
SOME people may remember this ‘story’ from Nicolas Roeg’s impenetrable film of 1976, starring The Thin White Duke himself. But the still indecipherable plot is really just an opportunity for a Bowie self-portrait, eulogy and tribute gig, rock-and-rolled into one.
We start with his personal swansong, Lazarus, and float through a total of 18 numbers, which the plot bends over backwards to accommodate.
Half are forgettable, but the others include some of my personal favourites: The Man Who Sold The World, Changes, All The Young Dudes, Sound And Vision, Heroes and one of my desert island discs (not that anyone’s asking), Life on Mars.
Most have been tweaked for the show, but they still generated plenty of dreamy nostalgia, for me at least. That’s partly down to Michael C. Hall’s performance as our wayward, hallucinating hero in silk pyjamas.
You may already know Hall as the vigilante serial killer from the TV crime drama Dexter. If not, imagine the face of Matt Damon, with the plummy voice of Frasier’s Kelsey Grammer. And yet, when he sings, he resurrects Bowie’s nasally squawk.
Visually, it may make more sense on screen than it did on stage. It’s set in a blank beige room with a super- sized TV carrying trippy images from our hero’s brain. This is set between two large windows offering views of the city below (and the backstage band).
Appropriately for Bowie, there are all manner of slick, rock concert special effects (at one point, an inky black shadow swamps the stage). But close-ups also allow you to be more intimately involved with our hero’s psychosis.
Some fans of the man who wrote Absolute Beginners may wince at the £16 price tag to watch. And although I didn’t absolutely love it, I’m absolutely glad I saw it.
THE original Theatre Company concluded an exceptionally impressive 2020 with Philip Franks’s free adaptation of the M. R. James ghost story The Experiment — which was again recorded on Zoom.
Renamed The Haunting of Alice Bowles, it does not, alas, rise to the heights of the earlier efforts, Birdsong and Apollo 13. But it’s a serviceable update of James’s spine-chiller.
A dysfunctional young couple of YouTube ghost- hunters get caught up in the 1918 story of a Norfolk woman whose wealthy husband is an apparent victim of the Spanish Flu epidemic.
Covid resonances are deliberate, but the tale feels a little overstretched in its new guise as a blend of Blair Witch Project and Victorian melodrama.
Stephen Boxer is a good, homely vicar. Tamzin outhwaite plays the shady widow, but her role is weakened by an adaptation that contrasts period airs and graces with today’s uglier manners.
But I’m still tipping my hat to a company that employed more than 100 freelances, and reached 30,000 households last year.