Here’s a traditional 'Break a leg' to the cast and crew on the opening night of Lazarus. Public performances begin this evening at the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) and the play will continue through to January 17th. A limited number of last-minute tickets for select performances are being released by the theatre. Check for availability by following NYTW on Twitter @NYTW79 and by keeping an eye on the NYTW website.
Posté le: Lun 14 Déc - 13:51 (2015) Sujet du message: Three extra performances for Lazarus on sale now
7 DECEMBER 2015
Three extra performances for Lazarus on sale now
“You want more and you want it fast”
Tickets are on sale now (http://smarturl.it/NYTWorg) for a final run of three extra dates for Lazarus on Monday, January 18 at 8PM, Tuesday, January 19 at 8PM, and Wednesday January 20 at 8PM. Keep reading for the press release.
#Lazarus #LazarusNYTW #TJNewton #TMWFTE
LAZARUS ADDS THREE MORE PERFORMANCES FOR FINAL EXTENSION AT NYTW LIMITED RUN MUST CONCLUDE JANUARY 20, 2016 TICKETS ON SALE NOW AT NYTW.ORG
(December 7, 2015 – New York, NY) Due to unprecedented demand, New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) (Artistic Director James C. Nicola and Managing Director Jeremy Blocker) has announced a final extension of three additional performances for LAZARUS by David Bowie and Enda Walsh (Once, Tony Award). The fastest selling show in NYTW history, LAZARUS is inspired by the novel The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis and directed by Ivo van Hove (Hedda Gabler, More Stately Mansions,Obie Awards). LAZARUS began previews on November 18 and officially opens tonight, December 7, 2015 at New York Theatre Workshop (79 E. 4th Street New York, NY 10003). The additional performances will be: Monday, January 18 at 8PM, Tuesday, January 19 at 8PM, and Wednesday January 20 at 8PM.
The final performance of LAZARUS on January 20, 2016 will benefit NYTW’s artistic development and education programming. Tickets are $1,000 (includes one ticket to the final performance plus a VIP invitation for two to NYTW’s upcoming production of Red Speedo) and $2,500 (includes one ticket to the final performance plus access to an after-party celebrating the run and a VIP invitation for two to NYTW’s upcoming productions of Red Speedo and Hadestown). Funds raised at this one-night only event support NYTW’s Artist Workshop activities through which nearly 2,000 artists develop more than 80 projects each year and their Education Initiatives including Learning Workshop, Mind the Gap, and Public Programs that serve over 1,600 students of all ages. All tickets to the benefit performance include a tax-deductible contribution.
Tickets for the additional performances are on sale now at www.nytw.org or by calling 212-460-5475 (Monday noon-6pm; Tuesday-Sunday noon-curtain time).
The cast of LAZARUS includes Golden Globe winner and six-time Emmy nominee Michael C. Hall (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, “Dexter”) as Thomas Newton, Tony Award nominee Cristin Milioti (Once) as Elly, and Michael Esper (The Last Ship) as Valentine, as well as Krystina Alabado (American Idiot), Sophia Anne Caruso (The Nether), Nicholas Christopher (Whorl Inside A Loop), Lynn Craig (Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson), Bobby Moreno (Year of the Rooster), Krista Pioppi (Spring Awakening Nat’l Tour), Charlie Pollock (The Wild Party), and Brynn Williams (Bye Bye Birdie).
Following his revelatory production of Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, the internationally acclaimed director Ivo van Hove returns to New York Theatre Workshop with LAZARUS. Mr. Walsh makes his return to NYTW after the successful run of Once. LAZARUS features songs specially composed by Mr. Bowie for this production as well as new arrangements of previously recorded songs.
The production features scenic and lighting design by Jan Versweyveld; costume design by An D'Huys; video design by Tal Yarden; sound design by Brian Ronan; choreography by Annie-B Parson; music direction by Henry Hey; dramaturgy by Jan Peter Gerrits; stage management by James Latus; and casting by Telsey + Company/Bernard Kelsey, CSA & Andrew Femenella, CSA.
Posté le: Lun 14 Déc - 14:11 (2015) Sujet du message: New York Times Lazarus review
8 DECEMBER 2015
New York Times Lazarus review
“Last night they loved you”
David Bowie took a bow on stage at the New York Theatre Workshop last night, following a triumphant first night’s performance of Lazarus. We’ll be posting a few reviews throughout the day, kicking off with this one By BEN BRANTLEY from THE NEW YORK TIMES. Here are a few quotations pulled from the piece...
Ice-cold bolts of ecstasy shoot like novas through the glamorous muddle and murk of “Lazarus”, the great-sounding, great-looking and mind-numbing new musical built around songs by David Bowie. These transfixing moments occur when Mr. Bowie feels most palpably present — that is, when one of the show’s carefully stylized performers delivers a distinctly Bowie number in a distinctly Bowie style.
More than any of his peers or imitators, Mr. Bowie, an international star since the early 1970s, has always come across as his own spectral avatar, in a series of beguilingly designed alter egos who are both there and not there. Even in the midst of white-hot stage spectacle, his affect has been one of cool disassociation, matched by songs that are rhapsodies of alienation; cries of solitary pain turn into our collective pleasure, and we citizens of an anomic world swoon and think, “We are David Bowie.”
Whether the song is vintage Bowie (“Changes,” “Absolute Beginners,” “The Man Who Sold the World”) or one of the new pieces (loved the self-lacerating “Killing a Little Time”), you usually feel you’ve ascended to a special tier of heaven, one produced by MTV.
Lazarus, a beautifully nuanced production that will be staged at the 200-seat New York Theatre Workshop through January 17th, continually emphasizes the surreal over the explicit at nearly every turn. People splash through milk. Others pop dozens of balloons. Strange women sniff others' lingerie (frequently). Impromptu kabuki actors invade the stage. And through it all, Newton — played by golden-throated Michael C. Hall, who is best known for his roles on Dexter and Six Feet Under but whose theatrical credits include big roles in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Cabaret and Chicago — mostly remains stoic, lonely, yearning. At its core, Lazarus is a two-hour meditation on grief and lost hope (with no intermission), but it takes so many wild, fantastical, eye-popping turns that it never drags.
What makes Lazarus more than your run-of-the-mill drunk-alien-can't-die-so-he-teams-with-an-invisible-friend-to-build-a-rocket story is van Hove's (and likely also Bowie's) imaginative eye. The set is sparse: an open fridge filled with gin bottles, a record player and stacks of LPs (by the show's creator), a ruffled bed and windows that offer scenic views of the band. A giant TV screen mirrors the onstage action and, in a strange turn, offers an odd glimpse of a repentant Alan Cumming, and the set itself is often bathed in projections. But everything becomes so much more than ordinary, especially when the actors come alive.
Lazarus may bear all the earmarks of a bad idea — a continuation of another story, a single-artist soundtrack, a television serial killer singing — but the plot is coherent, the songs are great and the performances are kinetic. Newton's unflappable loneliness is depressing, but it's also compelling. Maybe all the drinking was worth it after all.
David Bowie took a bow on stage at the New York Theatre Workshop last night, following a triumphant first night’s performance of Lazarus. Pictured here are (left to right) Sophia Anne Caruso, Michael C. Hall, Ivo van Hove, David Bowie and Cristin Milloti. We’ll leave you with a few quotations pulled from various reviews published in the last 24 hours...
Let’s start instead by calling Bowie’s first musical a riveting multimedia meditation — a visceral, disturbing, hallucinatory experience that’s as nonlinear and chameleonic as the rock star himself.
Some songs and avant-garde techniques may seem like throwbacks. But this is urgent, stirring, genuine rock art — musical theater like nothing that has fallen to Earth before.
Lazarus doesn't look or feel like any other musical currently playing New York. Even when it is not entirely lucid, it is still thrilling to behold. At a time when the conventions of the American book musical are feeling decidedly stale, we can be thankful that there are shows like this to push the boundaries.
The New York Theater Workshop is a great space for a show like LAZARUS. Directly across the street from famed LaMaMa, the performance-art home of the late Tom Murrin, Dancenoise’s Lucy Sexton and Anne Iobst, and Steve Buscemi, the music-video/performance art/video art choreography of Lazarus, with nods to so many of Bowie’s previous persona, all of which influenced many an East Villager, are perfectly at home in this space. And much like Newton, a creation of Bowie at his most drug-addled (he states he remembers nothing of the film’s production), the geishas and black balloons and milky secretions (a distinct reference to more oddities in the film) of Lazarus are manifestations of the loneliness, solitude, and distance that the icy tendrils of alienation forces onto an individual. Pained, unable to connect, and with a masking-tape spaceship as the getaway vehicle from one’s self, and highlighted by eighteen songs both classic and new, Lazarus is a choice extension in the grand ouevre for the perpetually enigmatic and highly individual artistry of David Bowie.
It’s the best jukebox musical ever. That may not sound like much of a compliment, but when you put David Bowie‘s musical catalogue at the service of book writers Bowie and Enda Walsh and director Ivo van Hove, the result is more than unique. It’s terrific must-see theater.
I haven’t experienced something this equal parts baffling and mesmerizing since David Lynch‘s “Muholland Drive.”
It's baffling as hell and unapologetically avant-garde. But if you're up for something like this, its arresting visuals, dreamlike atmosphere and introspective Bowie songs have the potential to keep you entranced for two straight hours without intermission.
Posté le: Lun 14 Déc - 14:36 (2015) Sujet du message: The Daily Beast Lazarus review
9 DECEMBER 2015
The Daily Beast Lazarus review
“My my, Someone fetch a priest”
TIM TEEMAN has posted a review for THE DAILY BEAST, headlined: “Inside David Bowie’s Weirdly Brilliant Off-Broadway Masterpiece”. Here are some quotations from it...
Not for David Bowie a Broadway spectacular, but Lazarus, an extension of a vintage Bowie role and filled with songs old and new, and some as familiar as Lazarus is strange. When rock gods land on the New York stage, they tend to do so loudly and on Broadway, as with Sting’s stirring opus, The Last Ship. But David Bowie: Well, obviously, he’s going to go for something smaller and cooler than the clotted, touristy streets around Times Square.
The staging and lighting of these pieces are works of art themselves: Your eye becomes fixed on details like the little rocket painted on the see-through screen separating stage and band, a circle labeled Mars beside it, and the smeared handprints of the actors who have thrown themselves at the screen at different points.
If David Bowie has set out to confound downtown theater-goers, he and his collaborators have made that confusion so visually rich it may not matter to you that the piece’s sense is far from conventional. By the end, my eyes were dancing.
Posté le: Lun 14 Déc - 14:58 (2015) Sujet du message: Lazarus makes TIME’s Best of 2015 list
11 DECEMBER 2015
Lazarus makes TIME’s Best of 2015 list
“You want more and you want it fast”
TIME magazine has published its Top 10 Everything of 2015. And it seems everybody involved with the creation and staging of Lazarus is due some congratulations. In the ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT category, Lazarus is a “Late Addition” in the Top 10 Plays & Musicals. Here’s what Richard Zoglin said about the production:
“David Bowie wrote the terrific rock score (a mix of old and new songs) for this new off-Broadway musical, in which Michael C. Hall plays the stranded space alien — now a melancholy, gin-swilling hermit— that Bowie portrayed in the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth. Busy director Ivo Van Hove’s staging, which features video screens, balloons, a tone of glam alienation, and a parade of characters whose significance (and even existence) is not entirely clear, is as mesmerizing as it is confounding.”
Posté le: Jeu 17 Déc - 18:36 (2015) Sujet du message: Reminder: Lazarus TV & radio premieres today
17 DECEMBER 2015
Reminder: Lazarus TV & radio premieres today
“I’m so high it makes my brain whirl”
David Bowie’s new single Lazarus, released digitally tomorrow, receives its UK premiere on BBC Radio 6 Music’s Steve Lamacq show (live now), shortly. As mentioned in the press release, the single's US premiere via NPR Music is also happening today. Finally, the theatrical interpretation of Lazarus will make the leap from stage to screen, when Michael C. Hall and the musicians from the musical perform the song on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Other guests on the show include Michael Moore and Samantha Power.
Here’s the Lazarus band line up, pictured from left to right in our montage:
Fima Ephron - Bass Lucas Dodd - Tenor & Bari Saxophones Henry Hey - MD/Arranger/Keyboard JJ Appleton - Guitar 2 & Keyboard Chris McQueen - Guitar 1 Karl Lyden - Tenor and Bass Trombones Brian Delaney - Drums
Posté le: Ven 18 Déc - 18:30 (2015) Sujet du message: Michael C. Hall sings new Bowie single
18 DECEMBER 2015
Michael C. Hall sings new Bowie single
“By the time I got to New York, I was living like a king”
As you surely know by now, David Bowie’s new single Lazarus (released globally in the digital format today), was performed by Michael C. Hall and the Lazarus cast and musicians on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City. Those who have access can watch the full broadcast here. Otherwise you can view Michael C. Hall’s performance of Lazarus here on YouTube.
Posté le: Ven 18 Déc - 18:30 (2015) Sujet du message: David Bowie is Michael C. Hall
18 DECEMBER 2015
David Bowie is Michael C. Hall
“Now ain’t that just like me...”
An amusing ad for the aforementioned appearance by Michael C. Hall on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was posted ahead of the broadcast yesterday. To make sense of our headline, go watch it here. Don’t forget, if you’re in the US you can watch the full broadcast here. Otherwise view Hall’s version of Lazarus here on YouTube. David Bowie’s new single Lazarus is released globally in the digital format today.
FOOTNOTE: Alongside the shot of Michael C. Hall last night is a picture of David Bowie from almost 40 years ago on the DINAH! show in February 1976.