David Bowie will unveil new songs when he teams up with Tony award-winning playwright Enda Walsh to bring a stage work based on his cult 70s film The Man Who Fell to Earth to a theatre off-Broadway later this year.
The production will feature new versions of Bowie songs as well as new material, with Walsh (who won a Tony for Once) writing the script.
Called Lazarus, the production will be performed at the New York Theatre Workshop. It will tell the story of Thomas Newton, the alien-turned-inventor from the 1976 film which was based on the Walter Tevis novel of the same name. Performances are scheduled to begin in winter 2015 and come four decades after Bowie’s Broadway debut, when he played the title role in the Elephant Man for three months in 1980. Bowie also played the lead in the original film, which was directed by Nicolas Roeg, but he is not expected to take to the stage in this production, which will be directed by the Belgian theatre director Ivo van Hove, who is known for his fresh and inventive approaches to production.
The news follows Bowie’s well-received 2013 album The Next Day and a career retrospective exhibition, which showed at the V & A in London before touring to Chicago.
