Henry Hey met David Bowie in 2012, when the producer Tony Visconti asked him to play some keyboard parts on Bowie’s album “The Next Day.” It went well. “I was told that David asked for me back,” Hey said recently. “I think we had a good rapport.” Hey, now the music director of the Bowie-driven musical “Lazarus,” at New York Theatre Workshop, was sitting on a chaise longue in the theatre’s basement, an hour before curtain, surrounded by wilted bouquets, prop gin bottles, and bags of inflated balloons. He wore black. Hey has curtains of wiry dark hair and a kind face. He described getting a call from Bowie’s people. “They said, ‘Can we meet and talk about something?’ ” He laughed. “And I signed some paper that said I wouldn’t talk about it.”
“Lazarus,” a sequel of sorts to the 1976 movie “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” with old and new songs by Bowie, a book by Bowie and Enda Walsh, and direction by Ivo van Hove, is a kind of “Space Oddity” in reverse. Its Major Tom is Thomas Newton (Michael C. Hall), an alien stranded on our planet, who drinks gin, eats Twinkies, and sings, pining for home, staggering around amid secondary characters and van Hovean splendor—video magic, blue wigs, black balloons, milk blood, a rocket ship drawn in masking tape. The show has confounded critics and audiences since it opened, in November, but its songs—sailors fighting in the dance hall, children immune to your consultations—are familiar. So is the feeling that Bowie is there but not there. The movie version featured Bowie but not his songs; “Lazarus” has the songs but not the man.
Hey leads the seven-piece house band, which he assembled. It performs at the back of the stage. Its drummer, Brian Delaney, has played with the New York Dolls. Hey said, “I didn’t want a typical Broadway band. I wanted a rock band. There’s a scene in a bar, and the band sounds like it’s a drunken bar band. It needs to sound like that.” Brynn Williams, who plays Teenage Girl 3, skipped by, wearing earbuds and singing. “I needed a special guitarist to play all this fiery stuff, these solos,” Hey said. Chris McQueen, a placid lavender-haired man, walked by. “I’m talking about you!” Hey told him. “I talked to David, and we said, ‘It really needs two guitars.’ ” The guitarist J. J. Appleton “plays the strummy parts.” The pop-and-jazz veteran Fima Ephron plays bass. Hornwise, Hey and Bowie wanted “dirty, greasy.” “So instead of trumpets, or high horns, just sax and trombone” (Lucas Dodd, Karl Lyden).
Hey’s arrangements can be unexpected. “David had a vision about how the script would work with certain songs,” Hey said. “ ‘This Is Not America’ is quite a departure from the ‘Falcon and the Snowman’ version. David said, ‘It should be something strange.’ I adapted it to this misty sound. It should be mysterious, because here we have Sophia singing it.” Sophia Anne Caruso, fourteen, plays Girl, an otherworldly blond waif who appears in Newton’s house. “Life on Mars,” a potential showstopper sung by Caruso, was arranged with restraint. “I did not want it to feel that all of a sudden we’ve turned a corner and it’s become Broadway,” Hey said.
Cristin Milioti, as Newton’s love-crazed assistant, sings “Changes” quietly, then thrashingly. “It needs to fit her character,” Hey said. “She’s truly unhinged. David and I sat down—he was at the piano—and went through it section by section: start slow and pastoral, then he suggested swing.”
“Heroes,” the finale, “really got transformed,” Hey said. “David wasn’t sure it should be there. It’s this giant triumphant rock anthem. That’s not the spirit of that scene.” The scene involves Hall, Caruso, and the masking-tape rocket ship. “I sent David a demo, and that finally sealed it for him. It’s very understated and melancholy. At no point does it ever arc up into this triumph. At most it only has a little lift in it.”
Appleton arrived, carrying a guitar case. “Am I late?” he said.
“You’re not late, but you should go onstage,” Hey said.
Upstairs, the band played a couple of songs. “Let’s play ‘Love Is Lost,’ ” Hey said. Two actors, Milioti and Michael Esper, noodled around onstage. A dramatic rock windup. “Welcome to our show!” Esper yelled to the empty house. Then: propulsive drumming; a snaky, determined guitar; haunted-house keyboards. Esper and Milioti shadowboxed. Michael C. Hall entered stage left. He looked at the boxers and smiled. Next, an old friend: “All the Young Dudes.” It was loose, dirty, greasy—anthemic, warmhearted sleaze à la Mott the Hoople. Milioti danced; Esper sang the lyrics about TV and T. Rex. Hall looked on, then crossed the stage and flipped through his character’s Bowie albums. ♦