"The great-sounding, great-looking and mind-numbing new musical built around songs by David Bowie...The script, by Mr. Bowie and Mr. Walsh, switches between passages of flat-footed, literal-minded exposition and cryptic collegiate dialogue...The rest of the cast members don’t always sound convinced by what they are required to say. You become impatient for the characters to stop talking and start singing again."
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"There’s precious little cheer to be had at 'Lazarus,' as it circles around a dramatic void...Despite the attractive ensemble’s sweaty, passionate effort and van Hove’s cinematic staging, there is a book...And that book more often bogs down in a portentous mode one might call In Yer Face Beckett Lite. Walsh’s elliptical, fragmentary scenes evoke a melancholy-menacing vibe, but fail to make us care much...Walsh’s lack of originality and depth makes the enterprise seem more earthbound."
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"So much imaginative horsepower has gone into the project that your contribution (and too often, it seems, your presence) is hardly wanted...The problem, for theatergoers looking for characters and narrative and the other useful trappings of drama, is that with all the visual and aural information, there is almost no room for any other kind. We get tics instead of personality, symbols instead of story, and, with few exceptions, dialogue that is spectacularly uninformative."
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"A work of blistering nihilism, no small sum of inscrutable foolishness and a fistful of the most brilliant contemporary rock you will hear anywhere...I can also say with some certainty that director Ivo van Hove has a rich imagination ideal for this wild ride...Van Hove and choreographer Annie-B Parson — have conspired brilliantly to bring this world — of missed connections, of inner and outer space, of longing and brutal rejection — electrifyingly to life."
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"You’d have as much luck raising the dead as you would making heads or tails of the hyperactive and hallucinogenic David Bowie jukebox musical 'Lazarus.' Far out? You bet. What’s it about? Who the heck knows?...As in most jukebox shows, tunes are shoehorned in, but at least it’s very tasty ear candy... Despite being blessed with Bowie cool and an ace catalog, 'Lazarus' is a two-hour endurance test."
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"The artsy stage piece has been directed by the iconoclast Belgian director Ivo van Hove, which guarantees a more theatrical kind of weirdness...There are some new songs in the show, but most of them are vintage Bowie and deeply appreciated during the many dull moments in this baffling show...Hall delivers them with all he’s got. But nothing he says (or sings) is especially illuminating about the show — or why we’re still here, puzzling over what it all means."
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"The show is an alienation alt-musical that channels the trippy dream state of an alcoholic extraterrestrial insomniac. So the two hours of 'Lazarus' are predictably strange, often impenetrable and a tad pretentious, but always fascinating, even when distancing...Whether or not the outre folly of 'Lazarus' pays off is wide open to debate, but this may well be the nearest thing to a Bowie musical that any of us could have hoped for."
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"Hunky-dory? Not entirely. Not yet...That which is outside of the main issue of going home, or not going home, just does not work. That's because you don't care about it, nor about the instigators of the subplots...'Lazarus' has visual sophistication, pan-sexual weirdness, historicism, the eclectic musical rush of the gorgeous. But in the theater, the shadows of characters in song need flesh, bones and reasons to believe in them."
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