David Byrne's American Utopia delivers "an experience unlike anything else" (Billboard) and marks a major cultural milestone in the worlds of music and theater. Innovative pop/rock icon David Byrne (Talking Heads, Here Lies Love) shares the spotlight with a diverse ensemble of 11 musical artists from around the globe.
Together with production consultant Alex Timbers and choreographer Annie-B Parson (his collaborators on Here Lies Love), Byrne and ensemble deliver "a marvel of staging and motion" (Chicago Tribune) that's as surprisingly poignant as it is supremely funky. Don't miss this "thought-provoking example of the power of live music" (Forbes).
American Utopia began as an album that David Byrne released on Nonesuch Records in March 2018. The recording was his first to reach number 1 on the Album Chart and was also his first to reach the Top Five on the Billboard 200 chart. The theatrical concert, which includes songs from American Utopia along with songs from Talking Heads and his solo career, played more than 150 dates in 27countries over nine months in 2018.
At times, the dozen bodies on stage - nine musicians (six of them percussionists) and the two singer/dancers - feel like an ecstatic Mardi Gras marching band in neutral duds, at others they are transformed into a collective circle that's discovered a primitive ritual that will unlock some hidden cosmic truths. It's the kind of work that you might find in a church basement in New York's East Village: wacky, weird, and slightly awkward - not typically on a Broadway stage.
More than a concert and less than a musical, a one-man show with a full backing band, American Utopia brings David Byrne - gray-haired, gray-suited, barefoot, magnificent - to Broadway. A loose agglomeration of songs, sometimes linked by brief monologues and get-out-the-vote exhortations, it is both an introduction to Byrne's particular psychology and catalogue and an oblique consideration of America today and how it might be bettered. Resistance is musical.
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