One of David Bowie‘s final projects, stage musical Lazarus, will receive a special one-time screening featuring a live scoring by the very same band that was hand-selected by Bowie for the show’s initial London run. The “motion picture/live soundtrack experience” is set to take place at Brooklyn, NY’s historic Kings Theatre on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2018.
As Rolling Stone notes, the seven-piece accompanying band features keyboardist/musical director Henry Hey, who was responsible for the new arrangements of Bowie’s classics used in the production, as well as keyboardist/guitarist J.J. Appleton, drummer Brian Delaney, saxophonist Lucas Dodd, bassist Fima Ephron, trombonist Karl Lyden, and guitarist Chris McQueen.
As the film’s bio reads:
Written by Bowie and Enda Walsh, Lazarus was inspired by Walter Tevis’s novel The Man Who Fell to Earth and starred Michael C. Hall [TV’s Dexter] as Thomas Jerome Newton, the character Bowie portrayed in the 1976 film adaptation of that book. Directed by Ivo Van Hove and produced by Robert Fox, Lazarus opened December 7, 2015 at the New York Theatre Workshop to great critical acclaim. The New York Times raved “Ice-cold bolts of ecstasy shoot like novas through the glamorous muddle and murk Lazarus, the great-sounding, great-looking and mind-numbing new musical built around songs by David Bowie,” while Rolling Stone hailed it as a “Surrealistic Tour de Force… milk-swimming, lingerie-sniffing, gin-chugging theater at its finest.” Tickets to the entire New York run of Lazarus sold out within hours of going on sale. The sold-out London production of Lazarus, which was filmed for the May 2nd event, had an exclusive limited run at the specially built Kings Cross Theatre from November 8th, 2016 to January 22nd, 2017.
The immense response to Lazarus was, of course, magnified by Bowie’s death just weeks after its initial premiere. However, the interest was not, by any means, solely based on novelty. Despite a famously innovative and shape-shifting career, David Bowie’s final chapter was one of his most interesting and creatively prolific. In his last five years on Earth, Bowie released two albums, The Next Day and Blackstar (which came just days before his death and featured eerily prophetic themes about death and the after-life) in addition to overseeing the production of Lazarus. Aware of his terminal prognosis all the while, he let on to virtually nobody that his time was running out. You can learn more about Bowie’s final five years from the HBO documentary David Bowie: The Last Five Years (2017).
Tickets for the very special screening are on sale now via Ticketmaster.
[H/T Rolling Stone]