David Bowie at rehearsals for Lazarus: wearing a feather embroidered wool-silk V-neck sweater by Alexander McQueen, plus the latest self-winding Louis Vuitton Tambour eVolution Chrono GMT watch in stainless steel. Facebook fans comment: “Back to blond!”. . . “Is that his John Shuttleworth impression?” … “Almost unbelievable that a man approaching 70 can cause such media interest”. . . “The watch is the Vuitton one he got for free when shooting in Venice [wink]” [Wrong!]. . . “Still not wearing his wedding ring though – it disappeared from his finger when he returned with The Next Day”. . . And a female: “Really the spit of his Dad there!”
Bowie as you’ve never seen him before. Nothing new about that. But here he is with black spectacles and short-back-and-sides (plus a hint of moustache or mere cool stubble?) coming and going while his new show Lazarus is in rehearsals in New York, modestly and without fuss, sitting in the auditorium for previews alongside its director Ivo van Hove. “No one saw him sat there! ‘I can behave very well so nobody sees I’m there,’ he would say.” And before an enthusiastic first-night audience on Monday, Bowie appeared unshowily on stage to take a bow along with the cast. In fact, he looked inwardly chuffed.
The multimedia production is co-written with Enda Walsh and presented off-Broadway at the 200-seat New York Theatre Workshop. It is Bowie’s surreal live stage re-imagining of The Man Who Fell To Earth, according to the entertainment site ShockTillYouDrop. “This is a Bowie show. Lazarus takes pieces from Bowie’s music, album covers, music videos, and more, to belie a virtual scrapbook of the artist’s career and ideas new, used and unused.”
The New York Times decides it’s a “great-looking and mind-numbing new musical built around songs by David Bowie”, four of them new (Lazarus, No Plan, Killing a Little Time and When I Met You). Some songs “are rhapsodies of alienation; cries of solitary pain turn into our collective pleasure”.
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Bowie and director Ivo van Hove at Lazarus rehearsals
Hall as Newton and Caruso as an angelic muse
Hall as Newton and Milioti as Elly his romantic interest
A hint of moustache? Bowie arrives for the premiere
Bowie takes a bow: Stylish men in T-shirts protect their jacket collars from sweat with an Alexander McQueen navy and silver skull polka dot evening scarf… Proper lapels too on this McQueen single button shoulder jacket in worn-away cotton and wool
Applause for Sophia Anne Caruso, Michael C. Hall, Ivo van Hove, David Bowie and Cristin Milioti
Under the headline “Bowie’s weirdly brilliant off-Broadway masterpiece”,
The Daily Beast says: “Lazarus contains its own surreal logic, but at its heart seems to be about love and connection, and the forces that can make or violently break such connections.”
Rolling Stone declares it a “Surrealistic tour de force: Impromptu kabuki actors invade the stage. And through it all, the humanoid Thomas Newton [The Man Who Fell to Earth] — played by golden-throated Michael C. Hall, who is best known for his roles on Dexter and Six Feet Under but whose theatrical credits include big roles in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Cabaret and Chicago — mostly remains stoic, lonely, yearning. At its core, Lazarus is a two-hour meditation on grief and lost hope (with no intermission), but it takes so many wild, fantastical, eye-popping turns that it never drags.”
In a nutshell, The Wrap media website raves: “It’s the best jukebox musical ever. That may not sound like much of a compliment, but when you put David Bowie’s musical catalogue at the service of book writers Bowie and Enda Walsh and director Ivo van Hove, the result is more than unique. It’s terrific must-see theater.”
Meanwhile in little ole London, look what has appeared on a billboard at Olympia – a stylish poster counting down to the January launch of Bowie’s new album, ★. And a Bowie New Year to us all!
Ta-daaa! Jonathan Barnbrook’s ★ billboard at Olympia
➢ The V&A touring exhibition David Bowie is. . .
opens 11 Dec at the Groninger Museum in Holland, running until 13 March…
➢ Plan your channel-hop with The Man in Seat 61
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➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ 