Lazarus

Lazarus is music theatre of an original and full blast overwhelming kind.  There are eighteen David Bowie songs, across his varied range of genres, satire, a Japanese sequence – in Japanese – a vicious killer, jazz balletdance numbers, a rocket ship, dazzling video projections and visceral sound design.  As a story, Lazarus continues the fate of Thomas Jerome Newton, the trapped alien David Bowie played in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 movie, The Man Who Fell to Earth.  But it is also Bowie’s own dreamscape metaphorical autobiography; and it is, yes, what used to be called ‘a rock opera’ – here a bewildering high-tech jukebox musical – in which the songs may be great, but not all of them quite fit in the story…

And what is the story?  Do not expect narrative logic or coherence here.  After all, what we see and hear is – or could be – a  stream of consciousness, all in the head of the gin-hazed, dying Newton (Chris Ryan) a man, or an alien, trapped in a New York apartment, longing to escape to the stars or to die – and yet afraid - haunted by his regrets, lonely but suspicious, aware of the sufferings of others, of jealousy and rage - but powerless to help – and finally finding hope in innocence and goodness. 

Having read the text and now seen the show, there are elements that still make no rational sense - at least to me.  And yet it has a kind of emotional logic which, together with the intensity of the performances and Bowie’s own choices of his songs, holds it together.  The onstage band, under the direction of Jethro Woodward, is impeccable, matching every change of style and mood.  The text presents an enormous challenge and to meet that challenge director Michael Kantor and his team follow the text (and, to some extent, I imagine, the original production by Belgian Ivo van Hove) and put a multi-media extravaganza on stage.  It’s a production packed with ideas, not all of them perhaps as successful as they might be.  For instance, Stephanie Lake’s and Tracie Morley’s choreography – so witty when ‘Hello, Kitty’ satirical – can come down to rather ordinary – because redundant – set pieces.

Award-winning filmmaker Natasha Pincus supplies the quite astonishing video material.  She is brilliant, but I wonder if here, given free reign, she is perhaps too brilliant.  The intention is juxtaposition or another layer to the text, but the fast-flowing poetic images she and her team have shot and assembled – ‘a portal into the unconscious of a troubled mind’, as she says – projected on a huge stage-width screen (amazing design by Nick Roux) can overwhelm and distract from the actors on stage and the dense allusiveness of Bowie’s often gnomic lyrics.  When it comes to her video depictions of the real Mary-Lou, Newton’s lost love, a small figure dancing clumsily on a beach (I think), things become banal.  The effect of these additions can be to distance and disengage us from the emotions of the characters.

Among the excellent cast, however, there are truly outstanding performances that more than survive the bells and whistles.  Mike McLeish as Michael brings presence, intrigue and clarity to a character only briefly part of the story.  (In a more conventional narrative, this character might be called a set-up with no pay-off).  Iota as Valentine, the personification of Death and destruction – and perhaps Bowie’s own paranoia - brings saccharine, creepy niceness and chilling rage and menace to the character.  His big numbers, ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ (with Mr McLeish), ‘Dirty Boys’ and ‘Valentine’s Day’ are each a challenging, defiant threat to the audience as well as to the young couple, Ben (Josh Yates) and Maemi (Kaori Maeda-Judge) whose puppy love he must destroy.  Emily Milledge, meanwhile, is the key character ‘Girl’ and she brings to her a gawky naiveté and innocence such that, while Girl is clearly the product of Newton’s imagination, she gives him the hope for which he has been searching.  (Bowie fans might ponder on that artistic decision – not a manic pixie but a ‘Girl’.)  Ms Milledge has a sweet and lovely voice, but diction problems mean some key lyrics do get lost. 

Chris Ryan sings with power and conviction as Newton, but as the fulcrum of the entire creation, he might be just a little too boyish and not enough the sick, alcoholic and tortured isolate the text requires.  But the moment Phoebe Panaretos, as Elly, begins to sing, the hairs go up on the back of one’s neck.  She is also an actor of such presence, such depth of emotion that she gives us a raw and recognisable human predicament; her Elly comes close to taking over the story.

David Bowie retained his fascination – and identification – with Thomas Jerome Newton, the alien who cannot return to his home planet or die, in both the movie and the original novel by Walter Tevis.  Bowie’s friends and associates testify that he too never quite felt he belonged anywhere.  Even as a little boy in the Cubs someone remarked of him that he seemed like ‘someone from another planet’ when he danced.  His 1970 creation Ziggy Stardust was in intention a character who ‘looks like he’s landed from Mars’.  And is there life on Mars?  In 1976, another iteration, The Thin White Duke, is the Man Who Fell to Earth redux.  In 1979, with his album The Lodger’, the Lodger himself is ‘a homeless wanderer, shunned and victimised by life’s pressures and technology…’  If any of this sounds like an artist feeling sorry for himself, consider the prodigious amount of influential and original work that continued to pour from Bowie until the very end.

When the time came for Lazarus – about which he’d thought for a long time, but which was to be his final work because he knew he was dying – Bowie very deliberately selected Irish playwright Enda Walsh as his collaborator.  Mr Walsh, who has written across a wide range of forms, is a man drawn to characters on the edge of madness and who finds depictions of everyday life in the theatre ‘boring’.  We don’t really know the nature of their collaboration – although a slightly awed Mr Walsh says it was wonderful – but we do know Bowie was someone who insisted on his own way…

The show ends – or more exactly after the show has ended – with a huge close-up of Bowie projected on the screen.  This elicits an almost palpable response – a sigh of admiration, love, nostalgia and awe.  And this is a fitting way to wrap things up.  Lazarus is about Bowie, it is Bowie, he is the subject and why we sit through and immerse ourselves in this disordered – or, if you like, enigmatic – work.  His fans (or devotees), through all his iterations, will relate to this show far more than those who are not, but it is an intricate, startling, puzzling and often moving show, nevertheless. 

Michael Kantor, his cast and crew have made something amazing out of what – to me – is a flawed and solipsistic piece.  It is also a brave step into new territory for Melbourne’s The Production Company, whose shows are wonderfully done but tried and true.  May this show attract a whole new audience for them.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Jeff Busby