Pull up a chair, kick off those shoes and make yourself comfortable. The stage is his house we are his guests. These naked feet seem like just another quirk of the performance until we arrive at “Everybody’s Coming to My House” – a song which perfectly illustrates Byrne’s direction. Through a vivid, musical-theatre exploration of his lyrics, Byrne attempts to understand why he finds others so intriguing: ‘I could never figure out why looking at a person is more compelling than looking at a bicycle’ he tells his rambunctious crowd.īyrne and his band spend the entire show bopping barefoot through a selection of Bryne’s most iconic tracks. Like Green Day and Madonna, Byrne moulds his music into a narrative structure but breaks new ground with immersive musical finesse, contemporary styling, theoretical pondering and political imperative. Queen of Pop, Madonna, also embarked on a similar endeavour, taking her Madame X show to theatres all over the world, using the combination of song and stage to tell a story of womanhood and performance. With “American Idiot”, the post-punk band Green Day incorporated their best-selling album into a narrative stage play to showcase the hypocrisies of modern-day America. This form of experimental theatre isn’t an entirely new sensation. The Avant-Garde sensibilities of New Wave are still very much alive and kicking in Byrne’s music here we see him exacerbate its symbolism into theatrics with robotic dancing, geometric shapes, clean-cut fashion, bold electronic rhythms, pop art iconography, and, of course, the unmistakable jagged melody of his own voice. American Utopia concerns itself with exploring how exactly it is we might learn to re-establish those lost connections.Īmerican Utopia is very much an ode to the era Byrne came up in with his band, Talking Heads. But, Byrne theorises, it is perhaps those very connections we have lost along the way which rob us of our ability to empathise and to connect with those around us. The awe-inspiring observation points to the origins of our individuality, attributing the remaining connections as the foundations of our personhood. The human brain of a baby, he puts it to us, is filled with neuro-connections which steadily deplete as the brain matures, until it reaches a ‘plateau of stupidity’. As the song comes to its close, Byrne addresses his audience for what is the first of many lectures of enlightened psychobabble. Byrne opens the show with “Here”, which he sings pointing to different sections of a model brain (‘Here is an area of great confusion’). Sitting somewhere between a performance and a concert, American Utopia manages to populate its runtime with the same ideas and meditations as any other intelligent piece of highbrow theatre, while also transferring the feeling of reckless abandonment that settles in as soon as the lights go down whenever an artist takes the stage. Immediately identifiable from the pack, with his mop of silver hair, slim figure and all-American twang, Byrne leads his eleven barefooted musicians on a rapturous, rip-roaring ride of serotonin inducing fun. With untamed freedom, the collective blur of smartly-dressed bodies moves together as one living organism, making beautiful music as they go. Musicians wander around a sparse stage with wirelessly amplified instruments strapped to their bodies unencumbered by wires and ugly, in the way cables, the performers find liberation from the usual restrictions of an average gig. Byrne strips the concept of a Broadway show to the bare bones usual sights of overblown props and ostentatious equipment are missing – it really is just them and us. The former Talking Head takes the stage with his band (or cast), each of them dressed from head to toe in identical silver-grey suits. That smile extends outwards acknowledges that you (yes, you) watching from behind the soft glow of a laptop screen or cosied up in the darkened room of your local cinema are just as much a part of this show as anybody else.ĭirected by Spike Lee ( BlackKklansman Da 5 Bloods), David Byrne’s American Utopia is a recording of Byrne’s live Broadway show: an artistic imagining of his solo album “American Utopia” with Talking Heads classics peppered in for extra pizzazz. ‘It’s just us, and you’ he answers with the flicker of an enigmatic smile appearing on his face. ![]() ‘What if we could eliminate everything from the show except the things we care about the most? What would be left?’ asks David Byrne to his packed audience, barefoot upon Broadway’s Hudson Theatre Stage.
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