“ The plot would revolve around a stockpile of unknown, unrecorded Bob Dylan songs, which had been discovered after Dylan died. “ He imagined the musical taking place in the future,” Cunningham wrote. They meet a group who are planning to leave Earth in a spaceship and take their chances on an unknown planet, but the alien is old and dying, and she can’t escape her exile. A female refugee and a male cyborg flee the city, heading west. The SF story, “Like Beauty,” begins in a New York City full of reptilian refugees from the first inhabited planet contacted by Earth. What apparently caught Bowie’s eye was Cunningham’s Specimen Days(2005), a collection of three novellas set in the past, present, and future, with Walt Whitman as a through-line. He acknowledged that he’d like at least one of the major characters to be an alien.” “ He’d never been entirely satisfied with the alien he’d played. (And there’s always the chance Cunningham made up the whole thing.)īowie allegedly contacted Cunningham and the two met for lunch in New York, where Bowie “ admitted that he was intrigued by the idea of an alien marooned on Earth,” Cunningham wrote. Cunningham’s prose style, his caginess about certain details and odd specificity about others, makes the piece read like a man recounting a long, bizarre dream, which is perhaps what collaboration with Bowie was like. He’d acquired the rights to Walter Tevis’ The Man Who Fell to Earth and was looking for a collaborator to turn the novel into a musical play.Īn article by the novelist Michael Cunningham, published in GQ this January, sheds some light on this dim period. And then there wasn’t.Īround 2007, Bowie was done with long-term touring, was ambivalent about making new albums. There was always another tour, another album to make. His itch to move on, to play at something new, was at odds with the time and drudgery needed to write and stage a play. Around 1998, Bowie considered reviving Ziggy Stardust in a multi-tiered offering: play, film, website, album. Outside was once talked up as a Robert Wilson production in Vienna. On it went: countless rumors, nothing produced. He’d play Winston Smith, Marianne Faithfull was considered for Julia, the project was scotched. He was “ keen on writing in such a way that it would lead me into leading some kind of rock musical…I think I wanted to write a new kind of musical, and that’s how I saw my future at the time.” Soon enough, he wanted to make 1984 a musical. In 1971, he envisioned Ziggy Stardust as a hipper Jesus Christ Superstar: he’d originate the role, other singers would take it over for road productions. When he was 21, he drafted Ernie Johnson, a rock opera about a man throwing a suicide party. Newton starts to sing:ĭavid Bowie had always wanted to write a musical. Now, a keyboard line, a call to attention on snare, guitar and saxophone riffs. This is it now.”īehind a glass wall upstage is a band, who have been onlookers: a smaller audience to mirror the larger in the seats. An old friend appears, asks him “don’t you remember the person you were? Your life outside?” “That was before,” Newton replies. He stretches, stands up, walks over to his bed. The alien Thomas Jerome Newton grudgingly resurrects. Something had come full circle: not sure what.) (At a post-Christmas performance that I attended, my friend Rahawa and I sat directly behind Duncan Jones. Hall didn’t move, barely seemed to breathe people taking their seats spoke in hushed tones. It felt a bit like being at a wake, those fifteen minutes before the lights dimmed. Hall if not, you might have thought it was someone playing a corpse, one whose presence would spark the drama once other characters shuffled in. You might have recognized the play’s lead actor, Michael C. Walking into a performance of Lazarus at the New York Theater Workshop in December 2015, the first thing you noticed was a man lying on his back on stage. Lazarus (Gail Ann Dorsey and McCaslin, live, 2017). Lazarus (Donny McCaslin Quartet, live, 2016).
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