9/2/2023 0 Comments Play lazarus by david bowieHall) is the baby who dominates this controlled environment, and gin is his mother’s milk. (The set and the lighting design are by Versweyveld.) At first, we see only static on the screen, then it and the surrounding walls are filled with TV images: politicians pontificating, housewives and kids smiling, products being sold. The set for “Lazarus” (now at New York Theatre Workshop) has the look of an incubator, with musicians positioned behind two glass panels separated by a video monitor. After that wonder of a show closed, van Hove and Bowie were said to be collaborating on a new work, “Lazarus,” which Bowie had co-written with the Irish playwright Enda Walsh. The images were shot from a distance, like memories, and to those memories he added the nostalgia that came from hearing Bowie’s “Golden Years” or “The Man Who Sold the World”: melancholy white soul music that connoted good times, and then the end of good times. (By stripping the play of all its usual gimmickry, the production’s designer, Jan Versweyveld, made a vista filled with grief, humor, and loneliness.) As Kushner’s characters talked about how they met or fell in love, van Hove sometimes projected images of a sunset on Fire Island-a meeting place for so many gay men. When the director Ivo van Hove used several Bowie songs in his staging of Tony Kushner’s AIDS epic, “Angels in America,” at BAM last year, it was the warmth and sincerity that Willis notes that shone through the sadness of the show, which was extraordinary and left me feeling wounded, my throat tight with all the goodbyes I managed to say and did not say during the years Kushner was writing about. What Bowie offers is not “decadence” (sorry, Middle America) but a highly professional pop surface with a soft core: under that multicolored Day-Glo frogman’s outfit lurks the soul of a folkie who digs Brel, plays an (amplified) acoustic guitar, and sings with a catch in his voice about the downfall of the planet. Writing in this magazine, in 1972, the critic Ellen Willis cast a supportive but cold eye on the performer: For rock purists, his attention to exteriors diminished his credibility and read as dandyism-a lipstick smear on rock’s machismo. Like an actor (and some of the black performers I admired), Bowie seemed to work from the outside in-creating stage pictures that sometimes worked in tandem with the words, sometimes not. Like Marcel Duchamp, he didn’t so much differentiate between high and low subject matter as play with the destabilizing force of presentation: he knew that you could get away with anything if you balanced the weird abrasiveness of the new with the calm of classicism. On his best records, you could hear modernism at work. But so did cocaine, sounds, fast cars, words, fame, fashion-all of which he treated as entities, like people. Love made him feel strange and connected and then nothing at all. ![]() He sang beautifully and dramatically about what a lot of singer-songwriters sing about: love. I didn’t come across “white” music-folk, stadium rock, New Wave, and so on-until I was in my late teens, which was when I first heard David Bowie one of my sisters had his superb 1976 album, “Station to Station.” Playing the record, over and over again, I focussed less on Bowie’s famous alienation-the alienation that informed his personae Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, and others-than on his warmth. Almost 20 years ago to the day, playwright Jonathan Larson died on the eve of the company’s first preview of his groundbreaking Rent.I grew up, musically speaking, in a fairly segregated world. The New York Theatre Workshop, an engine for bold works, has not been immune to tragedy like this. There is also a video appearance by Alan Cumming. The rest of the 11-member cast includes Tony Award nominee Cristin Milioti and Broadway veteran Michael Esper. “I’m done with this living!” a character cries out at one point - a line that had more depth after Bowie’s passing. The story has recurring themes of creatures caught between worlds and the exhaustion that comes with daily survival. At another, it is filled with dark balloons. At one point, the stage is filled with white liquid resembling milk, which some actors bodysurf on. ![]() His new assistant gets sucked deeper into his world Newton is visited by an ethereal girl who creates a rocket ship out of masking tape to take him home and he’s harassed by an enigmatic, black-clad figure. Newton, played now by Hall, has imprisoned himself in his own apartment, drinking gin, eating Twinkies, being tormented by his past and watching TV. The opaque story centers on millionaire alien Thomas Jerome Newton, whom Bowie portrayed in the film. David Bowie's "Lazarus" Video Was a Goodbye Note
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |