That brain, by the way, is Byrne’s prop partner for “Here,” a song about the brain (“Here is an area that needs attention,/Here is a connection with the opposite side…”), which he uses to introduce the observation that babies’ brains have more neurons than those of adults.
American utopia broadway review movie#
“It’s just us, and you,” says Byrne, speaking to the audience, and the movie nudges that “you” into a place beyond the fourth wall. But in “American Utopia,” Lee turns the stage into a diorama he keeps breaking apart and pushing back together. He shoots the show from a dizzying array of angles: head-on, looking down from the ceiling (the film opens with an overhead shot of Byrne seated at a table, staring at a plastic brain), and gazing up at the performers, so that we feel as if we’re inhabiting the space around them.Īny screen version of a Broadway show will take you closer to the action than most theater seats do. Lee extends that sensation with his giddy camera placement and close-up views of the musicians reveling in the cool joy of what they’re doing. Most of them carry wirelessly amplified instruments (a snare drum, a guitar, a digital piano), so they can stroll around the stage in a technologically liberated state of frictionless freedom. In “American Utopia,” the singer-musicians aren’t tethered to amplifiers or drum sets or big chunky keyboards. A handful of the numbers came from Byrne’s 2018 album “American Utopia,” but close to half of them were Talking Heads songs, most of which were featured 30 years ago in “Stop Making Sense,” Jonathan Demme’s epochal Heads concert movie. 20, 2019, consisted of the former Talking Head and 11 fellow musicians, all barefoot and dressed in silver-blue suits (a look that seemed inspired, on some karmic rock haberdashery level, by the image of Paul McCartney on the cover of “Abbey Road”), dancing and marching and prancing and bopping around a bare stage as they performed 21 songs. But Spike Lee’s playful and entrancing big-screen version of David Byrne’s “ American Utopia” is better than the next best thing - it feels more like a whole new thing.īyrne’s spiky and exuberant 21st-century rock-concert-on-Broadway jamboree, which opened at New York’s Hudson Theatre on Oct. When you watch the filmed version of a show like “Hamilton” or “Springsteen on Broadway,” it can feel like the next best thing to being there.
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