9/21/2023 0 Comments David byrne broadway![]() But many things have changed,” he continued, before segueing smoothly into the show’s standard introduction about how human brains change as we age. ![]() “I used to say that in the old world and it had a different meaning. And Byrne wastes no time getting straight to it after he takes the stage: “Thank you for leaving your homes,” he said. The pandemic is mentioned even before the performance starts: Whereas the earlier show was preceded by a recorded message from Byrne asking the audience to silence and put away their phones, now that message also includes a request for people to wear their masks at all times except when sipping a drink. Vincent) and “Toe Jam” (a relatively obscure 2009 song with grime act BPA), and even a Janelle Monae cover. “Where do those lost connections go?” It also has an uncharacteristically political subtext that unspools as the evening progresses, via a stark reminder of the importance of voting, as well as an impassioned segment focused on the Black Lives Matter movement that has sadly taken on even more gravity in the two years since the show opened on Broadway (more on both shortly).Īnd while “American Utopia” shares a title with Byrne’s latest studio album, songs from it make up less than a quarter of the 21-track setlist, which acts more as a carefully curated career retrospective, reaching all the way back to the Talking Heads’ 1977 debut and spanning crowd-pleasers like “Once in a Lifetime” and “Naïve Melody (This Must Be the Place)” to deeper cuts like “I Should Watch TV” (from his 2012 collaborative album with St. The show also has a thematic throughline, spawned from the concept that human brains have many more neural connections when we’re babies, which are gradually lost as we age: “Does this mean babies are smarter than us, and we get stupider as we grow older?,” Byrne asks. The chains are not only used to section off the stage but also occasionally as props - during “I Should Watch TV,” Byrne disappears into a brightly illuminated spot on the screen, as if a television is consuming him during another, the musicians’ seemingly disembodied hands hold out their instruments from behind the curtain, to comic effect. It is a seemingly simple but logistically difficult production: A completely bare stage with 12 “untethered” performers, who are more or less in constant motion, on a stage enclosed on three sides by curtains made of hundreds of small, hanging metal chains, which rise from the floor as the show opens. James on West 44th Street - Byrne basically took over the theater after Springsteen’s summer run closed on Labor Day weekend - does invite a brief comparison between the two.īroadly speaking, “American Utopia” is the same show that Byrne toured in 2018, adapted to Broadway the following year, and made into a Spike Lee-directed film a year after that - which is great, because it’s an artistically brilliant and thought-provoking performance that deserves to be seen by many more people (even if Byrne is probably staging it much longer than he’d originally planned). Of course, they’re dramatically different shows, but the fact that both staged their second runs at the St. It is insensitive to seem too happy to be back? Is it too much of a downer to dwell on the tragedies of the past 18 months? And if the appropriate tone is somewhere in the vast gap between the two, how does one navigate it?Īlthough the recent relaunch of rock-oriented Broadway shows by David Byrne and Bruce Springsteen in many ways had an easier return than touring acts - weeks-long residencies in a single theater involve little travel and equipment-moving - both faced a huge challenge in how to adapt and incorporate the pandemic into their thematic performances. While it’s a pretty small problem in the context of the larger challenges presented by the return of live music, how a performer addresses the pandemic during a performance is no small matter.
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