11/27/2023 0 Comments American utopia reviewsYet taken together, the music in “American Utopia” achieves a cumulative rush of Heady effervescence. It must be said: The numbers from Byrne’s solo albums can’t quite match the kicky panache of the songs from the Talking Heads era. The new movie builds and crests and surges, the flow of music interrupted only by the cheeky sincerity of Byrne’s stand-up-comedy stage patter (“Meeting people is hard! I know, I know: We have to do it”). The musicians come on a few at a time, and in many ways “American Utopia” feels like “Stop Making Sense 2020.” It’s a concert film gone digital, without the wires. Now, in his floppy white hair and life-size suit, still handsome and sleek but looking, at times, like a hipster Gore Vidal, he’s the aging rock star as sage, old and wise enough to let his inner spirit burst through. In “Stop Making Sense,” Byrne, with his dark hair and popping eyes, presented himself as a stylized vision of a man in a Big Suit floating between how-did-I-get-here? confusion and burning-down-the-house liberation. “American Utopia” is a show designed to heal those disconnections. But he’s really talking about something that links up with time-honored Byrne-ian obsessions - the loss of soul (and maybe mind) bred by the fake reality of middle-class consumerism, and the detachment he feels from his fellow humans. Growing up, Byrne tells us, is about losing neurons as we get whittled down to the identities we are. That brain, by the way, is Byrne’s prop partner for “Here,” a song about the brain (“Here is an area that needs attention,/Here is a connection with the opposite side…”), which he uses to introduce the observation that babies’ brains have more neurons than those of adults. “It’s just us, and you,” says Byrne, speaking to the audience, and the movie nudges that “you” into a place beyond the fourth wall. But in “American Utopia,” Lee turns the stage into a diorama he keeps breaking apart and pushing back together. He shoots the show from a dizzying array of angles: head-on, looking down from the ceiling (the film opens with an overhead shot of Byrne seated at a table, staring at a plastic brain), and gazing up at the performers, so that we feel as if we’re inhabiting the space around them.Īny screen version of a Broadway show will take you closer to the action than most theater seats do. Lee extends that sensation with his giddy camera placement and close-up views of the musicians reveling in the cool joy of what they’re doing. Most of them carry wirelessly amplified instruments (a snare drum, a guitar, a digital piano), so they can stroll around the stage in a technologically liberated state of frictionless freedom. In “American Utopia,” the singer-musicians aren’t tethered to amplifiers or drum sets or big chunky keyboards. A handful of the numbers came from Byrne’s 2018 album “American Utopia,” but close to half of them were Talking Heads songs, most of which were featured 30 years ago in “Stop Making Sense,” Jonathan Demme’s epochal Heads concert movie. 20, 2019, consisted of the former Talking Head and 11 fellow musicians, all barefoot and dressed in silver-blue suits (a look that seemed inspired, on some karmic rock haberdashery level, by the image of Paul McCartney on the cover of “Abbey Road”), dancing and marching and prancing and bopping around a bare stage as they performed 21 songs. But Spike Lee’s playful and entrancing big-screen version of David Byrne’s “ American Utopia” is better than the next best thing - it feels more like a whole new thing.īyrne’s spiky and exuberant 21st-century rock-concert-on-Broadway jamboree, which opened at New York’s Hudson Theatre on Oct. Byrne announced to cheers that the show would return in September.When you watch the filmed version of a show like “Hamilton” or “Springsteen on Broadway,” it can feel like the next best thing to being there. On the show’s closing day in February - I happened to be there with my sister and cousin - we were given happy news during curtain calls. For example, when Byrne and the cast sing Janelle Monae’s stirring protest song “Hell You Talmbout,” chanting names of Black men and women who died in racial violence or at the hands of police, Lee provides powerful visuals and adds more recent names like Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.Īs for Byrne, at 68 a remarkable font of quirky energy, he shifts seamlessly from somber moments like this to ebullient renditions of Talking Heads classics like “I Zimbra,” “Once in a Lifetime,” and “Road to Nowhere.” But nothing gets the audience out of their seats like the rollicking version here of “Burning Down the House.” Chances are you won’t stay in yours. Lee has made a few additions to the Broadway show. “I thought, what if we could eliminate everything from the stage, except the stuff we cared about the most?” Byrne explains. The set is spare and stylish, surrounded by shimmering metallic curtains in the same silver-gray as the suits.
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