The musicians are in more or less constant motion, performing choreography (designed by Annie-B Parson) that is deceptively elaborate yet almost never ostentatious: It’s all designed to be part of an overall effect, with lots of synchronized movement, walking in unison, and simple hand gestures.Īt times the group looks like a single organism: During one song, the musicians are huddled together on the left side of the stage, moving in a crouch across the stage as the song progresses while Byrne backs away from them, singing. The instrumentation is also deceptively simple: A guitarist (joined by Byrne on a few songs), bassist, keyboardist, two singer/dancers, and everyone else plays percussion, with the instruments harnessed to their bodies, marching-band style. The lighting is stark there aren’t even any colored lights until midway through the show, and even then they’re single colors to suit the mood of a song. The musicians - totaling 12, including Byrne - come onstage gradually, wearing headset microphones and matching grey suits and grey shirts, and all are barefoot (except for one, who was inexplicably wearing shoes designed to look like bare feet). They are not only used to section off the stage but also occasionally as props - during one song, the musicians’ seemingly disembodied hands hold out their instruments from behind the curtain, to comic effect. The show opens with Byrne seated at a table, holding a plastic human brain and musing on the neural-connection theory: “Does this mean babies are smarter than us, and we get stupider as we grow older? Where do those lost connections go?” Three sides of the stage are enclosed by curtains made of hundreds of small, hanging metal chains, which rise from the floor as the show opens. But the show is hardly sedate: Before launching into “Burning Down the House,” Byrne encouraged the audience to dance (while staying out of the aisles, in deference to the fire marshal). While “American Utopia” is essentially the same production that Byrne toured around the world for much of last year, it is far more suited to a Broadway theater than, say, a festival - in the intimate, seated confines of the Hudson, the staging, sound, colors and sense of movement have no distractions. The show also has a thematic throughline - spawned from the concept that human brains have many more neural connections when we’re babies, which are gradually lost as we age - along with an unexpectedly and uncharacteristically political subtext that unspools as the evening progresses. However, it’s not a greatest-hits set notable by its absence is “Psycho Killer,” which is probably not a song Byrne cares to revisit at this stage of American history. Vincent) and “Toe Jam” (a relatively obscure 2009 song with grime act BPA), and even a Janelle Monae cover. And while the show shares a title with his latest album, songs from it make up less than a quarter of the 21-track setlist, which acts more as a selective career retrospective, reaching all the way back to the Talking Heads’ 1977 debut and spanning crowd-pleasers like “Once in a Lifetime” and “Naïve Melody (This Must Be the Place)” to deeper cuts like “I Should Watch TV” (from his 2012 collaborative album with St.
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