• American Utopia (film)

11/5/22 (Sat)

I didn’t know much about David Byrne, but several friends had raved about the Broadway run that was caught on film by no less than Spike Lee – a curious combination. This is basically a concert by a more-or-less expressionless Byrne accompanied by nine musicians and two dancers (a dynamic black woman and a campy redheaded man whose garish lipstick was the brightest thing on stage). Byrne was front and center in numerous spoken soliloquies and all musical numbers, though he allowed all performers to have a moment in the spotlight. He’s not the smoothest mover – I now have an idea of what I must look like on a dance floor – but has great stage presence. Byrne gave the glorified concert a theme of sorts in his initial speech: holding a model of a brain in hand, he pointed out that we lose connections within our brain as we age and expressed hope over the course of the show that we can connect again. Apparently the song list was a mix of the familiar and obscure, though most of his big hits are said to have made the cut. The audience was reportedly older, not a surprise given his age (upper 60s at the time), the nostalgia factor for viewers, and Broadway’s typically outlandish ticket prices.

I wasn’t familiar with the songs or overly impressed with the bum rhymes and unimaginative melodies, but they worked in the context of the show. (Sample lyric: “The brain of a chicken / And the dick of a donkey / A pig in a blanket / And that’s why you want me.” Right. I thought I heard something about the cockles of the heart, but it turned out to be “a cockroach in the cosmos of your heart”. Whatever.) He gets points at least for creative imagery. He delivers them in a fairly stoic manner, which felt appropriate.

The quirky staging and choreography by Annie-B Parson were perfect for the material and the best thing about the show. The group members, all dressed in identical grey suits with bare feet, moved together in amazing harmony. Her staging ideas on the bare stage were highly imaginative. She had disembodied arms waving from the sides, turned the chains hanging across the stage into a television screen, staged numbers with various groupings and configurations, from robot-like arrangements to a marching band. The show was constantly on the move from start to finish, never a dull moment. This was helped by ingenious lighting design by Rob Sinclair. I especially loved the circles and squares projected on the individual performers early on, but the lighting throughout served the show rather than stand out on its own. I hope he won an award for that.

The show doesn’t start out particularly political. Byrne does mention all the immigrants on stage, presumably all legal, and how wonderful that is. He also goes on about voter registration in a nice segment, even managing to touch upon the 2016 election solely in that context without the usual hysteria. I wondered initially what Spike Lee saw in this material other than an early brief projection of the football player who “took a knee”, but it became clear once Byrne did a cover version of a protest song featuring photos of blacks killed, I assume, by whites. They showed the usual photo of six-foot Trayvon Martin as a child, and George Floyd somehow made the cut even though the show was performed before that incident – I guess Lee couldn’t resist throwing that in for the film. I was unmoved given the lack of any similar “say his name” for the vastly larger number of blacks killed by blacks. So the politics were not to my taste.

Still, the theme of connection was a good enough excuse for the proceedings, and the show in all was as good a concert as I’ve ever seen. No special effects, no wild costumes, no tracking or lip synching, all played live – he made that clear in a number where each musician played his/her instrument, then came together in fantastic harmony. Even the choreography for the musicians was deceptively simple but looked stunning. It was stripped to its essence, a model for how concerts should be. In that sense, I was glad to have seen it. While I wouldn’t rush out to buy Byrne’s albums, I’d recommend the film in a heartbeat.