![]() For many older Americans, that is well worth a $250 ticket to sit in the front orchestra. But the major draw for ticket-buyers is nostalgia - seeing Byrne up-close and momentarily reliving those times you were young and high and infuriating the old folks with your pound pound pound. The ever-moving musical formations onstage bring to mind the cheerful alliance of the high school drama club and marching band, a pact more ancient than NATO. Younger audiences will find plenty to like about American Utopia, from the virtuosity of the musicians to Annie-B Parson's weird and wonderful choreography. David Byrne stars in David Byrne's American Utopia. He makes an ideal tour guide through American Utopia, almost like a children's television host for adults. He's almost the perfect manifestation of the boomer mission to move beyond stifling conventions and institutions in order to unlock the potential within every individual, and it's hard to resist his idiosyncratic charm. And the magpie at the center of the nest is Byrne, an amiable if slightly alien figure who shares his genuine wonder at the world with 1,700 guests every night. The tunes in American Utopia are the result of liberal borrowing from world musical traditions - proof positive that culture is appropriation. And "Burning Down the House" gets everyone in the house on their feet. ![]() "Everybody's Coming to My House" offers an explosion of energy with a twinge of anxiety (as established by Byrne's introduction). It's impossible not to groove in your seat to "Lazy," or want to join the drum circle on "I Zimbra," if only to shake those maracas that look like they were made for a Super Mario villain. It was in abundance the night I attended, from the moment Byrne appeared onstage with a model of the human brain, singing "Here." He was soon joined by 11 other multitalented performers who danced, sang, played instruments, and sweated it out on an empty gray stage for 100 exuberant minutes. Tim Keiper (with the maracas), Gustavo Di Dalva, Stéphane San Juan, Daniel Freedman, and David Byrne appear in American Utopia on Broadway. To be clear: American Utopia is still the joyfest it was when it first opened at the Hudson Theatre in 2019 - and if there is anything audiences need desperately right now, it is joy. Those questions circled my brain like ravenous vultures during much of Byrne's bountiful feast of a concert at the St James Theatre. Do you still get to call yourself a rebel into your 60s and 70s, when your generation controls the politics, economics, and cultural means of production of the most powerful empire on Earth? And what kind of utopia has the hegemony of the boomers brought this country? And after viewing the arsenal of percussion that parades across the stage at David Byrne's Broadway concert, American Utopia, it is hard to dispute the old priest's assessment - even as that pound pound pound has come to represent not the knocking of barbarians at the gate of middle-class propriety, but the downbeat of dominant culture. And while the early New Wave band might have hit its peak during the cultural coming-of-age of Generation X, it gained plenty of fans among the boomers, that generation of eternal teenagers for whom rock and roll is a living faith. Like Talking Heads front man David Byrne, my parents are part of the baby boomer generation. For years they fondly recalled the encounter as proof of their allegiance to the counterculture: pissing off an old Catholic priest with their noisy music. They played it so much that an older priest on sabbatical in the adjacent unit eventually knocked on the door and asked them to turn it down, as he simply could not stand the constant "pound pound pound" in his words. The first family vacation I remember was a week in Destin, Florida, during which my parents played the Taking Heads album Speaking in Tongues on repeat. David Byrne leads the band in American Utopia, staged and choreographed by Annie-B Parson, at Broadway's St.
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