David Bowie's latest project is a new musical titled "Lazarus" that is now playing off-Broadway at The New York Theatre Workshop. Time Out New York's David Cote filed the following review for NY1.
You could call "Lazarus" a David Bowie jukebox musical. It re-packages his classic hits as well as new songs. However, don’t expect it on Broadway anytime soon. A trippy, multimedia fantasia about an extraterrestrial pining for home, the piece runs purely on dream logic. Thank goodness for those famous tunes to keep us engaged.
Michael C. Hall plays the stranded alien Thomas Newton, whom Bowie portrayed in the 1976 film "The Man Who Fell to Earth." The musical constitutes a kind of sequel.
A drunk and depressed Newton guzzles gin and wallows in homesickness, haunted and stalked by ghostly or demonic figures. The waifishly intense Cristin Milioti plays Newton’s assistant, who becomes romantically obsessed with him and his dead ex-lover. Michael Esper is a murderous stranger called Valentine. There’s a young girl who flits in and out of Newton’s minimalist studio: is she real or some psychic projection? Like most questions in the surreal, defiantly weird narrative, there’s no straight answer.
Irish playwright Enda Walsh churns out fragmentary, often banal dialogue that frustrates emotional or intellectual connection with the characters. However, the actors’ thoughtful, aching renditions of Bowie’s songs – "Changes," "Heroes" and, of course, "Life on Mars" - are gorgeously orchestrated and hauntingly sung. It makes you wish "Lazarus" were a 60-minute music video instead of this earthbound, avant-garde misfire.
If there’s a reason to attend "Lazarus" for anyone other than Bowie fans, it’s to see how the daring director Ivo van Hove keeps it all together through exquisite design and fiercely committed actors. In the end, Bowie’s songs are glorious; the show itself, alienating.