He’s our stand-in, our fellow observer-in-awe, though he has the advantage of wielding a camera.Īt the close of the show, as the performers snake through the crowd during a rapturous version of “Road to Nowhere,” Lee turns his camera on the audience- American Utopia ran from October 2019 to February 2020, at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre and is set to return to Broadway next September-and we see it for what it is: this is a group of largely white, middle-aged people who came of age listening to Talking Heads. Lee, working with one of this regular collaborators, cinematographer Ellen Kuras, doesn’t just show us the action he too is part of its embrace. As “Once in a Lifetime” rounds to its sublime peak, percussionist Jacquelene Acevedo bursts through the shimmery chain curtain with a clash of cymbals, a human celebratory announcement. Other times they march toward us, resolutely, in groups or pairs, as if to say, “Look at any of us individually, or all of us at once-you can’t go wrong!” Each performer’s style is as distinctive as a fingerprint: there’s the cool tomboy swagger of guitarist Angie Swan, the kid-next-door jubilance of bassist Bobby Wooten. Sometimes they’ll face one another, playing to each other even as they play to us. But as dazzling as he is, you can take your eyes off him: rather than receding, his fellow performers become dazzling planets in their own right. Though his hair is now snowcap-white, his dance moves haven’t changed over the years-he still favors angular, herky-jerky movements, like the folding and unfolding of a carpenter’s ruler, which are often mimicked, to grand effect, by the dancers around him. Read More: ‘I Can’t Just Write a Bunch of Songs As If Everything in the Last Couple of Years Didn’t Happen.’ David Byrne on American Utopia and the ElectionĪs for Byrne, he is, as ever, a wily and captivating showman. This number also represents one of the few times Lee cuts away from the show, to flash larger-than-life portraits of the victims, often held by a family member, on the screen. But he and his band present the song-an invocation, written in 2015, for all of us to remember the names of murdered Black citizens, among them Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till-with the synthesis of respect and bristling anger it demands. Byrne’s band here is racially mixed, but he himself is very, very white no wonder he approached with caution. And as a prelude to the show’s shiver-inducing version of “Hell You Talmbout,” he explains that he asked Monáe’s permission before venturing to cover the song. Between numbers Byrne addresses the audience directly, spinning amusing tales about where these songs came from (he wrote “I Zimbra,” with its lyrics by German Dada poet Hugo Ball, to respond to a challenge thrown down by his friend and collaborator Brian Eno), or urging us to fulfill our civic responsibilities (he uses a lighting trick to show how badly the citizenry is represented when only 20 percent of the population votes). This is a setting, a world, where certain essential problems have been worked out, creating the space and freedom to play.Īnd so even the songs every longtime Byrne or Talking Heads fan knows well-like “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody),” a moonlit cottage in ballad form, or the wriggly-waggly noodle dance “Slippery People”-take on new shapes and new life. The grand scheme is elegantly simple, yet never chilly. (The choreography is by dance veteran Annie-B Parson.) All the performers, including Byrne, wear identical lunar-gray suits, and all are barefoot the stage is bordered on three sides by a shimmery chain-link curtain. The musicians are also dancers and singers: their instruments are strapped to their bodies, untethered to any bulky sound equipment, which leaves them free to move and dance around the stage in a series of elegantly orchestrated numbers, with Byrne often at the center-though sometimes lurking at the edges, like living fringe-of the proceedings. But his desire to connect is robust, and it vitalizes everything that happens onstage during American Utopia. Even at age 68, he’s still like an alien learning the rules of the planet. Byrne is an admittedly weird ambassador for the idea of connection: he isn’t what you’d call a naturally warm presence, at least not in Earth terms.
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