Paradise Found on Broadway
Spike Lee turns David Byrne’s hit Broadway show into a spectacle of music and joy
Spike Lee turns David Byrne’s hit show, American Utopia, into a spectacle of music and joy.
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‘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,” Byrne sings from a steel-gray stage, a model brain in his hand. He points to another region on the brain and sings, “Here is a connection with the opposite side.”
Connection — not only between opposites and neural networks, but also in a world community — was the guiding element of Byrne’s hit Broadway show. It concluded its run in February 2020, a timely end for a work that finds unity in distance and bonds where many might only see difference. And now we get the movie version, which extends the metaphor right on time.
Byrne isn’t on that stage, or your screen, alone. There’s director Spike Lee, for one, who’s more than just a wingman. Like Jonathan Demme, director of Stop Making Sense, Lee isn’t just documenting — he’s heightening. We get closeups on Byrne’s face and feet; dynamic views from on- and offstage; and the thrill of seeing people standing up in their seats, clapping along. It all adds an extra dimension of liveness to the performance.
It helps that Byrne is joined by 11 musicians/ co-stars who are just as intriguing to watch as he is, everyone barefoot in matching (though not oversize) gray suits. They dance while they sing, and constantly reposition themselves across the minimally decorated stage. One second they’re a loose collective, everyone facing different directions; the next they’re a marching rhythm section.
Utopia is accurate, as titles go. Yes, Byrne is the lead singer. But he never comes off as a “solo artist with a backing band”; he’s more like the emcee of a party to which everyone’s invited. The musicians onstage are from around the world: France, Brazil, Canada. Byrne himself was born in Scotland. And in one of the many talkative monologues the former Talking Head delivers between songs, he says, in his assured but invitingly casual warble: “Most of us are immigrants.”
It’s a point more interestingly made by the pure spectacle of it all. Seeing the entire crew kneel, backdropped by a photo of Colin Kaepernick, is affecting. But even that can’t match the power of the group covering Janelle
Monáe’s “Hell You Talmbout,” a protest anthem, which in this updated rendition, climaxes with the entire group shouting Freddie Gray’s name.
A consummate entertainer, Byrne also plays the hits: “This Must Be the Place,” “Once in a Lifetime” — he knows what we want to hear. But he’s also trying, gently, to push us. His monologues never amount to generic good feelings more suited for Ted Talks. He’s widerranging. Hugo Ball and Dadaist ethics, police brutality, the Sony Trinitron television that Byrne bought with his first record contract — they’re all related, and even if they weren’t, it’s his job to make the connections. Your job is to relax and enjoy it. Clap along. Connect with one another — and yourself. As Byrne seems to say, we owe ourselves that much.