Lazarus

Lazarus had its world premiere Off-Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop on 7th December 2015, which was also the last public appearance of David Bowie, who would pass away just over a month later, on 10th January 2016.  

Lazarus is the surprising rock opera devised and wanted by David Bowie and written together with the Irish-awarded playwright Enda Walsh.   
In the show, there are several of Bowie’s most famous pieces, and four unpublished pieces written specifically for the rock opera. The songs are linked in order to build a fragmented and fascinating dramaturgy that includes the masterpiece that gives the title to the opera.

Bowie, albeit bent by illness, with an extraordinary and moving creative effort decided to donate to us this strange, very sweet, black, pulsating object of musical theatre that can be considered – together with the magnificent Blackstar album – his creative testament.  

The Italian version of the show is signed and directed by ERT Director Valter Malosti and starring by Manuel Agnelli, a famous Italian musician and rock singer.

Lazarus’ playlist: Lazarus / It’s No Game / This is Not America / The Man Who Sold the World / No Plan / Love is Lost / Changes / Where Are We Now? / Absolute Beginners / Dirty Boys / Killing a Little Time / Life on Mars? / All the Young Dudes / Always Crashing in the Same Car / Valentine’s Day / When I Met You / Heroes

« More than 50 years after the original Walter Tevis novel and 40 after Nicholas Roeg’s film, which saw Bowie provide his best performance as an actor, in Lazarus, writing a labyrinthine sequel with Walsh, he has chosen to pick up the threads of the unhappy story of the interstellar migrant Newton of “The Man Who Fell to Earth”. Newton, forced to remain on Earth, cannot die and does not age. A sequel, perhaps to conclude even that outstanding chapter, to free or get rid of that character, as he did in the “Blackstar” video with Major Tom’s equally melancholic epic of “Space Oddity”.
In light of his death, we tend to read all that Bowie has created in his last years as an autobiographical allegory, especially when given a number of clues seemingly obvious like those we find in Lazarus. But Bowie, as always in his creations and alter egos, is using Newton as a vehicle for a series of constant themes of his music: aging, pain, isolation, loss of love, horror of the world, and psychosis induced by the media. Newton is both Bowie and not Bowie at the same time. But it is precisely through this act of distancing that we are allowed the most intimacy deep.
In Bowie and Walsh’s version, the alien is still a prisoner on Earth, increasingly isolated in the world, closed in his apartment, in the throes of depression, a victim of his ghosts and of gin addiction, a dying man who can’t die. In this desperate situation, Newton receives signals from the past through the TV, picks up visions of the future generated by his mind, and mixes reality and daydreams. Various characters (ghosts? mental projections?) roam the claustrophobic space of Newton’s apartment (or in the devastated continuum of his mind?).»

Valter Malosti

LAZARUS BOOKLET