There’ll be no musical like a David Bowie musical

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/06/david-bowie-musical-lazarus

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A musical version of David Bowie’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth can’t have been high on many people’s lists of likely projects for the increasingly reclusive star. Yet last week the New York Theater Workshop announced it will be staging just such a production later this year, featuring new songs from Bowie. Lazarus will be based on Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel – the plot sees alien Thomas Jerome Newton land on Earth seeking to ship water back to his drought-stricken home planet where his family are dying, but he ultimately descends into an alcoholic haze, betrayed by those around him, thus suffering a two-fold alienation. But as unlikely as it seems, this project honours some enduring themes in Bowie’s work and looks set for creative success.

Bowie’s involvement with the original film came about under strained circumstances. Adrift in America on a sea of cocaine psychosis, his contribution to director Nicolas Roeg’s film was an almost purely aesthetic one – he looked like an alien so he played an alien. His implausibly snow-white body, chiselled cheekbones, dyed flame-coloured hair and skinny suits in the film meant it was an entry of particular note in the annals of Bowie style, not least because it spilled over into the Thin White Duke character he would soon create. A still from the film was used for the cover of 1977’s Low, which was comprised mainly of Bowie’s unused efforts for the film’s soundtrack (the track Subterraneans shows how beautifully this would have worked out). The film marked a significant point for Bowie’s career, but whether he made an important contribution cinematically is less clear.

The emotional potential is there in the story for this musical adaptation to work

As an actor, Bowie has long been ridiculed, and he certainly hasn’t always picked his projects well. The aptly named Thomas Jerome Seabrook noted in his book on Bowie’s mid- to late-70s period, his turn as Newton “is almost universally regarded as David Bowie’s greatest performance as an actor”, but this is faint praise since “this, perhaps, is because he barely had to act at all”. This is made abundantly clear in Alan Yentob’s 1974 documentary for the BBC, Cracked Actor, filmed the year before work started on The Man Who Fell to Earth, and the inspiration for Roeg casting the rock star – Thomas Newton and the David Bowie of the documentary are completely indistinguishable. Ultimately, while Roeg made full use of the desolate beauty of both his leading man and the New Mexico location, the disjointed editing meant The Man Who Fell to Earth could be criticised for lacking narrative drive. How exactly this stilted story of alienation and desperation might translate to a musical is unclear.

Lazarus is obviously not going to be a glitzy dry ice, hydraulics and painfully literal lyrics affair. It will be staged at a venue associated with theatrical innovation and directed by Ivo van Hove, known for productions of Ingrid Bergman and Jean Cocteau. Yet van Hove also has form with the mainstream musical, having directed Rent under the auspices of Dutch theatrical producer Joop van den Ende, himself responsible for productions of The Lion King and Sister Act. The point of the best musicals is that they are able to do naffness with such unselfconscious confidence that they transcend their inherent absurdity and become genuinely affecting. Roeg’s treatment of Tevis’s novel managed to have emotional clout as Newton loses both his alien family and his human love interest, Mary-Lou, with the highly charged themes of sexual intimacy and the loss of children continuing from Roeg’s previous film, Don’t Look Now.

The emotional potential is there in the story for this musical adaptation to work and, as an actor, Bowie has shown an ability to make what looks ridiculous on paper work on an emotional level. The man with a premium on cool has routinely made the absurd credible: from a Broadway Elephant Man without prosthetics but just a finely tuned physicality to express his body’s brokenness, to the “mime” scene in the 1983 prisoner of war film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, and the range of characters in the spoken-word interludes on his 1995 album 1 Outside..

Related: David Bowie: 10 of the best

With Bowie having been in a state of semi-retirement for years, it must be asked why he has chosen to return to this story above other projects. The novel follows a more apocalyptic vein than the film, with a nuclear war having largely destroyed Newton’s home planet and Earth facing the same fate without alien intervention. Apocalypticism and dystopia are themes that have long fascinated Bowie – from the weirdly upbeat Hunky Dory out-take Bombers, to Five Years (“News guy wept and told us / Earth was really dying”), the dome-dwelling survivors of a nuclear holocaust in Drive in Saturday, the Orwellian nightmare of Diamond Dogs, and his post-9/11 album Heathen, which opens ominously with the words “Nothing remains”. The Christ-like nature of Newton as persecuted saviour also continues a rich seam in his work ever since the “leper messiah” Ziggy Stardust, and which is also found in the implied second coming of Starman and even in the characterisation of the Thin White Duke as a Nietzschean superman and kind of inverted, occult messiah. It is these themes that might have drawn Bowie to re-approach The Man Who Fell to Earth from a more authorial perspective than was possible as an actor.

Co-writer of Lazarus, Irish playwright Enda Walsh, describes himself as a “practising misanthrope”, a description which could well be applied to Bowie and suits Tevis’s bleak tale. This may be a writing collaboration that will take this “musical” as far away from the chirpy connotations of that label as can be imagined.