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Lazarus review

  • Theatre, Musicals
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Lazarus Production Company 2019 supplied
Photograph: Jeff Busby
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Time Out says

4 out of 5 stars

David Bowie's musical could be Mamma Mia's evil twin

It looks so weird on paper: The Production Company, largely set up to mount forgotten gems of musical theatre, whose recent highlights have included Oklahoma and Brigadoon, taking on the otherworldly genius of David Bowie. There’s a long, and often disastrous, association between musicals and rock/pop, but surely this would have to be the most awkward merger since The Who’s Tommy. And previous productions of Lazarus – including the original directed by famed theatrical iconoclast Ivo van Hove and starring Michael C Hall – have largely confounded critics and audiences alike. We have absolutely no doubt this production will divide opinion too. Which is why you should see it for yourself.

Based on the character of Thomas Jerome Newton – who Bowie played in Nicholas Roeg’s haunting, if rather dour 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth – the musical concerns itself with an alien stuck on our planet, in a kind of reverse of Major Tom’s situation in Bowie’s famous song, ‘Space Oddity’. It’s a curious point, that whether you’re an astronaut trapped out in space or an alien stuck here on Earth, it amounts to the same thing. Alienation is ultimately the final bonding agent of the universe. Bowie and Irish playwright Enda Walsh have hit on this sense of alienation, of isolation and of existential drift, and centred an entire show around it.

And if that sounds like a drag, or worse a slice of indulgent navel-gazing, then you haven’t figured in Bowie’s incredible songs, which function here as gateways of perception far more than dramatic or narrative signposts. Some of them are obscure and unnerving, like 2013’s ‘Dirty Boys’, and some are the most iconic songs in his catalogue. But this isn’t the kind of show where audiences tick off the hits, or sink into reverie and nostalgia; it’s like Mamma Mia’s evil twin, a sustained and strangely resonant tone poem that touches on murder, alcoholism and suicide ideation. Meryl Streep would run a mile.

It isn’t an accident that Michael Kantor, in his debut for this company, was chosen to direct. Kantor is, along with Barrie Kosky, deeply influenced by German theatre, and his preoccupations are evident throughout this production. Thus we have a wall of screens that halves the acting space, on which a constantly evolving series of images is projected; we have neon pops of colour against black backgrounds; we have a deliberately industrial quality to the sound, lush but also technocratic. This melds ingeniously with Bowie’s own obsession with Berlin, the city that was key to his musical evolution post Ziggy Stardust. The film projections are directed by Natasha Pincus, and they take us from sweaty nightclubs to reverse-blooming flowers via images of the collapse of the natural world, reminiscent of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 experimental film Koyaanisqatsi. In a nod back to Roeg, via Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, there are also eyes; lots of eyes in intense close up.

It’s all highly expressionistic, which is hard on the performers who have to build a credible psychological framework for Bowie and Endo’s tangential imaginative leaps. Chris Ryan is the man who fell to earth, less alien than broken everyman; his gorgeous, pure tenor gambols effortlessly over the music’s considerable requirements, and his desire for escape, both literal and figurative, is oddly moving. Emily Milledge, referred to simply as the Girl, is the emotional rock in Newton’s dissociative world, even if she may not actually exist. Phoebe Panaretos brings her own existential angst and a richly sonorous contralto to the role of Elly, and iOTA is snakily seductive and charismatically performative as a kind of murderous id named Valentine.

Technically, it’s a marvel. Anna Cordingly’s set and costumes manage to feel familiar and otherworldly; Paul Jackson’s lighting design beautifully augments the film projections, refining the visual excess; and Stephanie Lake, turning for the first time to musical theatre, choreographs swathes of movement that are both tender and ironic. The band, under the musical direction of Jethro Woodward, is beefy but also supple. There’s talent here to burn, like great satellites passing through the earth’s atmosphere.

Lazarus is most definitely a departure for the Production Company, an attempt to reach out to new audiences who aren’t necessarily rushing to purchase tickets to their upcoming Thoroughly Modern Millie. It probably isn’t helpful to even think of it as a musical, but rather a post-rational, kaleidoscopic visual and sonic collage; a meditation on the futility of existence, the pulsating power of love and the fragility of the human experiment. Is there life on Mars, indeed. Or, to quote Monty Python, let’s “pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space, because there’s bugger all down here on Earth”.

Tim Byrne
Written by
Tim Byrne

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