12/11/2023 0 Comments American utopia reviews“I saw that and my mind was blown,” says Byrne, still amazed. The shows sometimes began with patrons walking through basement rooms where actors were, say, hanging from a swing. Being a Robert Wilson piece-using language less like dialogue and more like concrete poetry-it wasn’t your typical Broadway production. The same year that Byrne founded the Talking Heads, he showed up at what is now the August Wilson Theater for a work by experimental playwright Robert Wilson titled A Letter to Queen Victoria. The Talking Heads not only gave us minimalist, near-punk hits (“Psycho Killer,” “Once in a Lifetime,” and their Top 10 hit, “Burning Down the House”), they also helped us reimagine what a rock concert could be. He played in rock bands in high school and college and, after a stint at the Rhode Island School of Design, started in 1975 what might be called the ultimate art-rock band. Growing up in suburban Maryland in the ’60s, Byrne had, he recalls, zero interest and little exposure to classical American theater-save for a Broadway cast recording of The Sound of Music that was a staple in his family’s LP collection. So as singular as it seems, American Utopia might just be the direction Broadway is going: toward innovative performances that move us in new and startling ways. You might say that Broadway is feeling flexible, with members of the downtown avant-garde regularly landing real estate uptown. And then there’s Hadestown, the album of netherworld ballads from singer-songwriter Anais Mitchell that is now a Tony Award–winning musical. Still to come this year is an adaptation of Alanis Morissette’s groundbreaking album Jagged Little Pill, and next year, Girl From the North Country, a Depression-era musical set to the songs of Bob Dylan, is expected to arrive on Broadway. The more traditional jukebox musical is on something of an upswing as well, with the Go-Go’s Head Over Heels Ain’t Too Proud-The Life and Times of the Temptations and Tina: The Tina Turner Musical. The past few years have seen Bruce Springsteen, and more recently Regina Spektor and Morrissey, move into midtown venues. “We just want to bring it out a little bit more,” Byrne adds, “but, without, you know, putting a pin in it, without putting a nose on the clown.”īroadway loves noses on its clowns, to put it mildly, but Broadway is also lately in love with rock stars and pop stars and what you might call musical residencies. “We don’t want to be reductive!” Parson says. The protagonist is transformed, in other words, by the people around him-though you don’t want to push Byrne or Parson on what it all means. Although it has neither dialogue nor plot nor anything resembling a typical narrative structure, the show, you might say, is a search for good connection, and it is not giving too much away to say that at one point, the cast poses with Byrne for what resembles a family portrait (the production was still being developed through the summer). “Now, it feels like a bad connection,” he sings. Performances begin with Byrne seated alone at a small table, pondering the disconnections of the brain. As Alex Timbers, the show’s production consultant, puts it: “It’s part rock concert, part theatrical spectacle, and part intimate exploration of a major artist’s career.” The Broadway show-which opens this October at the Hudson Theatre-will be a new iteration of that glorified concert: a series of songs performed by a barefoot band, untethered and able to move around the stage as a dance troupe might. Produced by Lola Productions set design, Andrea Stanley. “In a certain way, it’s people coming for entertainment,” says Byrne of Broadway, “but in other ways it’s America speaking to itself.” In this story: hair, Thom Priano. They speak like old friends, which, at this point, they are. It’s a hot summer day, and the Talking Heads founder is walking Parson through his gorgeous archive of tapes, files, and art, to the office in the back, where they are working on the show’s transition from stage to stage-in this case, from concert venue to Broadway theater. She is remembering all this in the SoHo production studio of David Byrne, her childhood idol turned frequent creative collaborator, four months before their latest project, American Utopia, arrives on Broadway. “I was kind of addicted to them, until I totally rejected them and got into Talking Heads,” she says, laughing. “Those old dances, I know them by heart”-and not just the dances but everything about them. It was at home that she watched the midcentury classics. This turned out to be a relevant education for the cofounder of Big Dance Theater, the experimental company that injects dance into theater and theater into dance. WHEN ANNIE-B PARSON was a kid growing up in Chicago in the ’70s, her father didn’t take her to see musicals he took her to the ballet.
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