Jan Versweyveld’s set is clever, with Thomas’s boredom with the world reflected in his long beige bedroom, the most boringly earthbound room that ever existed. Right, really nailing the archetypes there! At one point a character describes him as “sorta sad, sorta unknowable in the way that you imagine reclusive, rich, eccentric men to be”. Hall, often sounding just like Bowie when he sings, gives emotional depth to a character the play’s script seems determined to diminish. Both exist to save Thomas and be saved by him, but neither can save themselves from the ridiculous lines they’re forced to say. Girl, meanwhile, is a figment of Newton’s imagination, twirling around him as if she’s singing China Girl on The X Factor. Despite this not exactly attractive proposition, and the fact that she’s married, she is suddenly overwhelmed with love and incapable of keeping her clothes on around him. Elly is hired to be Thomas the Alien’s PA, even though he doesn’t do anything but drink gin. The two main female roles in the play, Elly and Girl (Caruso), are merely Manic Pixie Dream Girls with even fewer clothes than the role usually demands. All of this could have been fun, were it not for the impenetrable plot, absurd dialogue and cringingly subservient female characters. Lazarus is, really, a jukebox musical for people who think they’re too hip for We Will Rock You: alongside a few new songs, there are old reliables such as Changes and Absolute Beginners, shoved with varying degrees of awkwardness into the story. Hadley Freeman: ‘My God, the last half hour is tediously po-faced’ Lazarus might concentrate on Bowie’s alien side, but it stands as a reminder that he was human after all. But this is a deeply flawed piece of work. It’s one of a handful of really good things about Lazarus, to which you might add: Hall’s performance and the band positioned on stage, who sound fantastic throughout. Whether much is added to the song by its staging – which sees Hall and Sophia Anne Caruso slide around in a milky liquid – is a moot point, but sonically at least, their duet highlights its underlying sense of fatalism and despair, rescuing it from the air-punching triumphalism it seems to have acquired in recent years. The one big number that survives the transition to the stage is “Heroes”. Even in the WTF? all-bets-are-off atmosphere of this play, there’s something jarring about a female character singing the opening lines of Life on Mars?, apparently in reference to herself, when she visibly doesn’t have mousy hair. For a mercy, what you might call the Broadway-ification of some of Bowie’s old songs, audible on the original cast album, seems to have been dialled down, but there are still a lot of moments where songs have been crowbarred in with craven clumsiness.
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