WORTH A LOOK?: **
WHERE: King’s Cross Theatre
WHEN: 27/10, runs to 22/1/17
The original cast recording of this show already sits at number 8 in this week’s midweek album charts as we take our seats for this third preview in a new temporary 800-seat King’s Cross Theatre venue.
- Read on for reasons including Sophia Anne Caruso’s beautifully realised Girl
Lazarus is based on 1963 Walter Tevis’ novel The Man Who Fell To Earth, which also spawned the 1976 Nic Roeg film in which David Bowie starred as immortal extraterrestrial Thomas Jerome Newton. We saw that film last month ahead of our Q&A with Lazarus star Michael C.Hall (Dexter, Six Feet Under), who plays TJ Newton.
The musical is scripted by Enda Walsh (Once), features 18 Bowie songs and is directed by Ivo van Hove (the Young Vic Tony Award-winning A View From The Bridge).
van Hove has outdone himself with a set which incorporates a live band as well as dramatic curtains and a screen which gives us a particularly effective stabbing. However, where is the story? It’s essentially The Man Who Fell To Earth continued in a New York flat but, really, who cares?
The acting is superb. Sophia Anne Caruso’s The Girl is in fine voice and Hall sounds like Bowie and is emoting at a level to suggest we should care about this. But do we? It’s a jukebox musical masquerading as something much more important. Lazarus? Not worth bringing back from the dead.
monstagigz 
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