And there is, indeed, another candidate – for the New Testament has a second Lazarus, the poorer Lazarus of Luke 16:19-31. Indeed, the problem in The Man Who Fell To Earth is that Newton cannot die in order to be raised! He appears to remain young despite his miserable – albeit wealthy – plight on Earth and the passing years.īowieWorld’s own messageboard has already queried which Lazarus is being referenced. Does that really describe the Lazarus of Bethany? In fact, there seems to be little in the play, the video of the song, or the song itself that points us directly to the Lazarus of John 11 – or even to bodily or commercial resurrection. The subject matter of this Lazarus seems to focus on immortality and desolation rather than resurrection – in fact, resurrection has no part to play in the production.Īgain in Rolling Stone, Andy Greene notes that the song, Lazarus, opens the theatre production: “The tune appears to have been written specifically for the play since it’s told from the perspective of a formerly wealthy, lost man living in New York that yearns to fly away, which is essentially the plot of Lazarus.”īut let’s think about that: A former wealthy man, in torment, seeking resolution. Rolling Stone’s preview of Lazarus suggests that the play would be an extension of his film The Man Who Fell To Earth, the continued life of the alien named Newton, a character unable to die – wealthy, but soaked in gin and dissolution, rather than one who is somehow resurrected. This isn’t his grand final statement (that was Blackstar), it’s a cool little postscript tagged onto an earnest, unthrilling tribute.In his final months, however, David Bowie also co-wrote a musical – called Lazarus (incidentally, the last account he followed on twitter was also “God”). So is this it for Bowie’s music? Nah, there's still more in the vaults: there were several more songs recorded at the Blackstar sessions, and according to producer Tony Visconti, Bowie recorded demos for another five songs shortly before his death. “Killing a Little Time,” whose shuddering groove recalls the double-time tricks of Bowie’s mid-’90s records, includes a refrain of “I’m falling, man/I’m choking, man/I’m fading, man.” But the line that Bowie clearly relishes growling is “I’ve got a handful of songs to sing/To sting your soul/To fuck you over”-which would work just as well on somebody’s first record. Unsurprisingly, the newly released songs are full of intimations of mortality-but it’s also too easy to listen for farewells and forget that they were written for dramatic personae, by a songwriter who adored masks. The “Lazarus” performance, whose guitar riff eventually just turns into “Purple Haze,” is the strongest thing on the cast album, possibly because Bowie’s own performance wasn't casting such a long shadow. The three previously unheard Bowie recordings on the second disc, a bit under twelve minutes of music in all, are of a piece with the Blackstar material, if not as audacious or as polished as “ Blackstar” or “Lazarus” or “Sue.” “When I Met You” is the jewel-in-the-rough of the bunch-Bowie’s backing vocals body-checking his warbling lead out of the way, the band a little out of tune and too into stomping out the rhythm to care. As translations of Bowie’s musical aesthetic to theater go, Lazarus lags far behind *Hedwig and the Angry Inch-*in which Hall also starred for a while. And, despite some nicely considered arrangements (“The Man Who Sold the World” takes after Bowie’s mid-1990s reworking), a lot of these songs weren’t actually built for the stage: when Sophie Anne Caruso sings “Life on Mars?” as a scenery-chewing torch song, it’s suddenly clear how much of its power came from Bowie’s arch detachment. To put it more plainly: there is no song in Lazarus of which Bowie did not record a better version. The central problem is that Lazarus is billed as an original cast recording, and it’s kind of not it’s impossible to hear these “actorly” renditions of “Changes” and “It’s No Game” and “Love Is Lost” and so on without thinking of the cracked actor who defined them, and whose phrasing these performers ape at almost every turn. (Near the end, we hear forty seconds of his original recording of “Sound and Vision,” and it’s as if a conference room’s ceiling has momentarily peeled back to reveal the sky.) The show’s cast recorded the first disc on January 11 of this year, immediately after they’d learned of Bowie’s death, and the solemnity of the moment mutes the hypnotic delight of his songs. Bowie recorded the three new Lazarus songs during the Blackstar sessions with saxophonist Donny McCaslin and his group, but only “Lazarus” itself actually appeared on Blackstar a second disc with all three recordings has been appended to the soundtrack album.
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