"Old Words into Something New": David Bowie and Enda Walsh's Lazarus

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• "Old Words into Something New":David Bowie and Enda Walsh's Lazarus
• Michael Jaros (bio)

Introduction: Avant-garde jukebox musical?

When it was announced that David Bowie was to be involved in the creation of a new musical called Lazarus, which would premiere at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2015, it became the most sold-out ticket in that company's history.¹ Its popularity was buoyed by the fact that Ivo van Hove, one of the most successful directors in the contemporary theatre, would direct, and Enda Walsh, the well-known Irish playwright who had recently achieved success adapting the film Once for the stage, would co-author the script. Billed as a sequel to Walter Tevis' 1963 novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, Lazarus continues the saga of the alien Thomas Newton, who is stranded on earth living on a diet of cereal and gin and watching a continuous stream of television.

When Lazarus opened, reaction to the production was tepid. Critics appeared thoroughly confused by the piece, which was decidedly distant from any sort of jukebox musical where, as Millie Taylor notes, "the familiarity of the music is used to draw the audience into an interaction with the performance."² For Hilton Als, who titled his New Yorker review "static," Lazarus amounted to only so much cold noise. After praising Bowie's genius, recounting his own personal memories of the singer's music, and recalling Bowie's masterfully surreal performance in the 1976 film adaptation of Tevis' novel, Als maintained that he found the play to be confusingly fragmented and cold.³ Bowie's memorable music was certainly present, along with some new songs: people at the New York Theatre Workshop watching the premiere would themselves hear the title [End Page 194] song "Lazarus" several weeks before Bowie himself released the single. A cadre of characters sung his songs, but the narrative surrounding them was fragmentary and hallucinatory. Various characters, who may or may not be figments of his imagination, arrive and depart, and ultimately Newton himself "finds rest" in an escape to the stars.

Despite such critical reservations, Lazarus eventually transferred to London. In the interim, however, Bowie died, succumbing to cancer. I will argue that, alongside his last studio album Blackstar, which was timed for release with Bowie's birthday and subsequent death, the musical Lazarus was itself also a deep reflection on mortality and Bowie's own performative legacy. In co-writer Enda Walsh's dramaturgy, Bowie recognized the return of such themes again and again, and he chose Walsh specifically to help craft such a story for the musical. Given its subject matter, Lazarus was certainly an outlier as a jukebox musical; the work defied the audience and critics' expectations alike. Lazarus did include many of the jukebox musical's features: it was comprised of work from Bowie's pre-existing song catalog (along with a few new offerings) and those songs were sung by fictional characters in a plot constructed around the songs.⁴ Yet the work was decidedly more avant-garde than the nostalgic fare offered by most jukebox musicals. Als' review, replete with its nostalgic recollections of Bowie, reveals just such a befuddled horizon of expectations. Instead, Lazarus exhibits what Theodor Adorno and Edward Said both describe as "late style," a sort of terminal creative period in the life of an artist in which, as Adorno writes, "the power of subjectivity . . . is the irascible gesture with which [the "subject" of the artist] takes leave of the works themselves . . . of the works themselves it leaves only fragments behind."⁵ Bowie was far from embarking on a nostalgic retrospective of his work in the musical; the singer was, as Philip Auslander dubbed him, "authentically inauthentic," constantly speaking through the masks of various personae his entire career.⁶ It is fitting that for him the fragmentation so characteristic of late style would involve a fictitious character, Thomas Newton, whom he had played on screen. Indeed, immediately post-production, Bowie claimed that he thought he was Newton, the marooned alien, and went on to assume Newton's look for one of his most well-known personae of the 1970s, "the thin white...