![]() In 2012, Tony Visconti, Bowie’s longtime producer, asked him whether he had a couple of days free for a hush-hush project. Hey is a keyboardist, arranger and composer who has played with the likes of Dionne Warwick, Rod Stewart and Ariana Grande. By all accounts, this last act was as vital and joyous as it was haunting. And yet, while his final works grapple with mortality and existential despair, madness, identity and violence, his collaborators knew him as an artist who was fully engaged and reveled in the sometimes sweaty work of making music and theater. The Next Day and Blackstar bookended a fertile four-year stretch, a creative run all the more remarkable given that over the previous year and a half Bowie was fighting the illness that would kill him. It was almost as if he were emulating his old friend John Lennon, who had quit music for half a decade of house husbandry during the 1970s. Bowie had recovered, but aside from rare appearances at charity or tribute concerts and a few small acting gigs, he seemed content to live quietly in downtown Manhattan with his wife, model Iman, and their daughter, Alexandria, now 16. It was his first new music since 2003, ending a decade of silence in which he for the most part had kept out of public view, a sabbatical apparently prompted by an onstage heart attack in June 2004 in Prague. If Blackstar seemed shadowed by Bowie’s death, The Next Day consciously marked a rebirth. Blackstar, Bowie’s 25th studio album, had followed a strong 24th - The Next Day, which came out in 2013. You normally can’t say that a 69-year-old man has been cut down in his prime, but maybe this time you could. The show had instantly sold out its run, drawing rapturous audiences and mixed but respectful reviews. It was a sequel of sorts to the novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, about an alien stranded on Earth, a character that had obsessed Bowie since he played the part in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film adaptation. Lazarus, meanwhile, was a deeply personal work of musical theater - Bowie’s first as a creator. Recorded with a group of jazz musicians, Blackstar had earned wildly positive reviews even before Bowie’s death gave it a sentimental gloss. Adding unintended drama, he had released a new album, Blackstar, three days earlier, on his 69th birthday. The passing of an iconic star always devastates fans, but given that Bowie was in the midst of a late-career renaissance, his death seemed unusually cruel. “I wrote to the cast and said, ‘Look, we have to do this thing because this is what he wanted.’ And everybody showed up and gave it their all.” But there was no thought of cancelling the studio date. “None of the cast knew about David’s situation,” says Hey, who had been aware of Bowie’s illness, though not necessarily that the artist was nearing his end. He had been fighting cancer for a year and a half but kept the severity of his illness so private that his death shocked some of his closest collaborators. News would break early that morning that Bowie had died the previous day. “We found the one date that worked for the cast,” says Hey. 7, 2015, at the New York Theatre Workshop and was going to close Jan. ![]() ![]() Hey’s problem was the show’s limited run: It had opened Dec. Hall and Cristin Milioti, both well known to theater aficionados and TV audiences (for Dexter and How I Met Your Mother, respectively). Unconventional, impressionistic off-Broadway musicals don’t always go to the expense of making cast albums, but this one was a no-brainer: Its book was co-written by David Bowie, its score featured 18 of his songs and its cast was headlined by actors Michael C. Henry Hey, musical director of the off-Broadway show Lazarus, was struggling late last year to find a date to record a cast album. ![]() Francesca Cappucci, Former Entertainment Reporter at KABC-TV, Dies at 64
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