![]() Translated for the stage alongside Alex Timbers and Annie-B Pearson, expect a minimalist masterpiece that offers an unmissable journey into his unique life and career. ![]() Released in March 2018, American Utopia marked Byrne's seventh solo record and his first to hit the Billboard Album Chart #1 spot. A friend of Bowie and collaborator with Brian Eno (who featured on American Utopia's lead single 'Everybody's Coming to My House,) his perpetual zeal for creating has cemented him as a true auteur, an icon of the modern age. In typical Byrne style, expect a spectacle that combines his musicianship, artistry, and delightfully off-beat nature as he presents favorites old and new in this highly acclaimed show.Īs a leader of the New Wave scene in the late 70s and early '80s, Byrne has enjoyed enduring success firstly with Talking Heads and then as a solo artist, filmmaker, photographer, activist, and writer. As Byrne seems to say, we owe ourselves that much.Former Talking Heads frontman and all-around excellent human David Byrne graces us with a very special pre-Broadway engagement of his theatrical concert, American Utopia. Connect with each other, and with yourself. ![]() Hugo Ball and Dadaist ethics, police brutality, the Sony Triniton television that Byrne bought with his first recording contract - they’re all related, and even if they weren’t, it’s his job to make the connections. His monologues never amount to the monotonous good feelings more suited for Ted Talks and Apple product launches. But he’s also trying, however gently, to push us. It goes without saying that Byrne, a consummate entertainer, also plays a few hits: “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” “Burning Down the House,” “Once in a Lifetime” - he knows what we want to hear. But even that can’t match the power of the group covering Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout,” a powerful protest anthem which, in this updated rendition, climaxes with the entire group shouting Freddie Gray’s name. Seeing the entire crew kneel onstage, backdropped by a photo of Colin Kaepernick, is effecting. It’s a point more interestingly made by the pure spectacle of it all, which wears its influences as comfortably as Byrne’s music ever did. Performances will begin on Friday, September 17, 2021. And in one of the many comfortably talkative monologues he delivers between songs, he says, in that assured but invitingly casual warble of his: “Most of us are immigrants.” OctoDavid Byrne’s American Utopia will return to the live stage on Broadway in the fall of 2021 at a theatre to be announced. The musicians onstage, in keeping with the theme, are from around the world: France, Brazil, Canada. The proceedings here are far less interested in Byrne alone than in the former Talking Heads singer as the emcee of a party to which all of us are invited. We could all use a little Utopia right now, and David Byrne’s American Utopia is burning down a brand new house on Broadway This production featuring astonishing staging. But despite being unaffiliated with a band, he’s never come off as a “solo artist” in the literal sense. 44th St. All of it lends a sense of alive-ness to this live performance. David Byrne 's Tony Award-winning musical American Utopia plays its final performance April 3 at Broadway's St. And, of course, there’s the thrill of seeing people standing up in their seats, clapping along, silhouetted against Byrne’s bright, inviting presence onstage. The former Talking Heads frontman leads the concert-styled production. There are close-ups on Byrne’s face, his eyes, even his feet dynamic roving views from onstage and off a keen awareness of the audience. Like the late Jonathan Demme, director of Stop Making Sense, Lee is here not just to document but to heighten. There’s also director Spike Lee, who, as he did adapting the rock-musical Passing Strange into a movie in 2009, is more than just wingman-ing here. A filmed version of the hit Broadway show that ran from October 2019 to February 2020 (and begins streaming on HBO Max October 17th), it’s a time capsule with a timely end-date for a project that finds unity where many of us might only see difference and disruption. He points to another region on the brain: “Here is a connection with the opposite side.”Ĭonnection - and not only between opposites, but in the manner of a neural network or, to make the obvious but still valuable analogy, a world community - is the guiding element, maybe even artistic theology, of American Utopia. American Utopia begins where David Byrne’s 2018 album of the same name ended: with the song “Here.” “Here is an area of great confusion,” the former Talking Heads singer declares from a steel-gray, uncluttered stage, a model brain aloft in his hand.
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