DAVID BOWIE’S LAZARUS
DAVID BOWIE’s last act was to finish Lazarus – the stage musical that resurrected The Man Who Fell To Earth and fed ideas into Blackstar. As it comes to London with a soundtrack CD in tow, cast and crew relive its creation and explore Bowie’s vision. “He
As The Dame’s swansong musical hits London with a cast CD in tow, we tell the inside story, unpack those three ‘new’ Blackstar songs, and… more?
n 2005, film and theatrical producer robert fox, the brother of actors James and edward, received a present from a friend. it was a copy of Walter tevis’s novel the man Who fell to earth, with a hand-written inscription: “robert, i’m not a human being at all. thomas Jerome newton. Shhh… david Bowie.” Bowie, it transpired, had recently bought the rights to the story whose crash-landed alien hero he had inhabited in nic roeg’s 1975 film adaptation. But fox heard no more until early July 2013 when Bowie called him to a meeting at a london hotel. he explained he wanted to construct a sequel. “it’s based around the character i played,” he told fox. “and it’s called lazarus.” lazarus: the man who came back from the dead. in 2016 it’s a staggering irony: that another of david Bowie’s last creative works has become a kind of immediate afterlife, with a musical transferring to london this month and the cast soundtrack, augmented by three unheard bonus tracks written for the show and recorded with the Blackstar band (see panel p62), just hitting the shelves. another testament to Bowie’s lifelong passion for theatre and musical theatre to add to watershed multimedia coups including his pre-fame stint in lindsay Kemp’s mime piece pierrot in turquoise (filmed in 1970) and a rapturously reviewed lead role in Broadway’s the elephant man (1980, see panel p61). Bowie himself attended lazarus’s off-Broadway opening night on december 7 at new York theatre Workshop. We know now that he had not long to live.
TWo and a half YEARS PREVIOUSLY, ONLY the economy with which Bowie described the work to robert fox suggested any urgency: “he was always quite… elliptical,” says fox in measured tones today. “he never went into huge detail but you knew if he brought something up it had importance for him. Specially around work.” at that first meeting in london, fox recalls, Bowie asked him, “‘Who are the great young writers?’ and i said, enda Walsh.” in the event, Bowie read through a number of scripts, then agreed that the irish playwright’s explosive style, full of confusion and dysfunction and proven on lauded 1997 play disco pigs and the musical version of once (2011), was perfect. When Walsh received the call to meet Bowie and fox in new York in September 2014 he was, by an extraordinary coincidence, on holiday in new mexico: the location of the man Who fell to earth movie’s key desert scenes. thrown in the deep end, he was soon immersed in conversations about the newton character: “this man,” says Walsh, “who can’t leave and who can’t die.” in essence, this work would play out in the alien’s own head. “it’s a journey into the internal, into the mind,” says Walsh. “hence [the set is] not an apartment, it’s a mind space. then the rules are out of the window… we’re passing narrative through this unsettled mind. then the piece becomes about the conversa-
tion a person is having with themselves.” Bowie had already envisioned many of the setpieces. “He mapped it out for me,” says Walsh. “That we have Newton, this dead girl and this woman who over a short period has this mental breakdown and becomes this other woman, Mar y Lou. And this man, Valentine, who just wants to fucking kill love!” Over the autumn of 2014, the Lazarus story was shaped by Bowie and Walsh together, with Bowie updating Fox via e-mail. In the early days, the Ellie character was called Ellie Lazarus; that changed, but the central concept remained. Walsh: “Lazarus is of course the overall title for the situation the person is in – that transitional thing of being in purgatory and now not, a man trying to find clarity and rest.”
ArOuNd OcTOBEr, FOx WAs introduced to director Ivo Van Hove, and saw his acclaimed production of Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge at the Young Vic in London: “I was totally blown away; and e-mailed david as soon as I got home to say, this is the guy.” Bowie delegated Walsh to watch the production too; he agreed. When they floated the proposition to the Belgian director he told them that, not only had he already used Bowie’s music in his own productions, but when he’d first left Belgium along with boyfriend (and set designer) Jan Versweyveld at the age of 19, they had flown to New York to see Bowie’s Elephant Man. soon, Van Hove was in New York for his first run-through of the reading draft: “It was wonderfully bizarre,” says Walsh. “david read him the first act, playing all the characters.” With musical director Henry Hey, honing continued. It was only in december 2014, says Fox, that he, Ivo and Walsh were made aware of a vital part of the context: “david told us that he wasn’t well. He couldn’t be around for certain parts of the workshops and wanted us to know if he wasn’t around it was because he couldn’t, not because he’d lost interest. That’s when he said, ‘We’ve got to do this. And crack on with it.’” The revelation added force to the preparations, especially for the core quartet. But for those in close contact with him, like Walsh, there was a lightness to the proceedings, too, because, “david is one of the most personable people, so it was always about you, or the project – not about him. so it was way in the back of my mind, because there was so much going on, and he was working on Blackstar, and still seemed to have this extraordinary energy.” The pair would have darker conversations, though always about the character of Thomas Newton, to whom Bowie felt “very connected”. They discussed how a character might change “when he’s pumped with morphine, or when he isn’t. What happens to the brain. We talked about [dennis Potter’s] The singing detective, how when you watch it you are so unsure what the fuck is going on.” At other times, their conversations would be funny or silly. Bowie and confidante coco schwab took Walsh to New York’s Museum Of Modern Art, Bowie commenting on art shows, or the aesthetics of New York stairwells, in a grating derek &clive voice. “He was bloody funny,” says Walsh. Michael c Hall was the first cast member to be recruited, after being checked out by Van Hove in the closing days of his run in Hedwig & The Angry Inch, probably around January 2015. It turned out to be a brilliant decision, for in the play he carves out his own Newton, and somehow steps out of the character’s numbness and self-pity to deliver Bowie songs in an effortless baritone that taps into the alien, without aping the songs’ creator.
"ONCE WALKED IN THERE WAS SOMETHING THAT GAVE ME PERMISSION TO RELAX. HE'S MAGIC IN A LOT OF WAYS." MICHAEL CHALL