I just can't stop thinking about this show. A few weeks back, a matinee at St James Theatre in New York and the last in the current run of David Byrne's American Utopia Broadway adventure.
We all know Byrne, who turned 70 over the weekend. We know the shorthand – Talking Heads and that big suit – and we may even know some of the longhand too, such as Playing the Building or his How Music Works book. What we sometimes miss in the detail is the overarching dedication to the art of working out just what it is makes us humans tick.
This is something Byrne has been at for years. I’m currently reading Will Hermes’ Love Goes to Buildings On Fire, a superb look at New York’s musical lingua franca between 1973 and 1977. In the midst of it all - in the midst of a salsa splurge documented by an Irish DJ on local station WRVR and a new classical uprising conducted by a jobbing cabbie and furniture mover – Byrne steps quietly into the downtown picture. He hasn’t been out of the picture in the city or beyond the five boroughs since.
The Broadway show is a beautifully rendered extrapolation of the show he toured round these parts back in 2018. The basic broad brushstrokes recast for a midtown theatre run. The intricate structural calculations run again and again and again. The swashbuckling joi-de-vivre re-upped and upped again. The musical verve of Byrne’s back pages still lifting you higher and higher.
Throughout, though, you could sense how the show fitted into the bigger frames. This is what Byrne has been doing for years: taking the micro and making it macro. The basics of what he as an artist does is to make music. But what you see on that stage, with those incredible musicians by his side, is the next level of that ambition, something all artists aim for but few rarely hit as much as Byrne.
Afterwards, he probably sent his suit to the dry cleaners, got on his bike and headed home. He might well have come up with the next adventure as he dodged some potholes.
