But so, too, is the wryly curious people-watching of his 1986 film True Stories the idiosyncratic music theory of his 2012 book How Music Works the synchronized movement and drumlines of his involvement with color guards the self-explanatory credo of his “Reasons to Be Cheerful” talks and the flair for shaping a theatrical narrative honed in his 2013 immersive dance musical about Imelda Marcos, Here Lies Love. The punk/funk/new wave fusion of the Talking Heads years is amply represented along with the expeditions into electronica, zydeco, Afrobeat, Latin and other world music influences. It’s a sensational concert by any measure, but also a highly sophisticated extension of much of what Byrne has been doing over an eclectic and influential career spanning almost five decades. Hatched out of Byrne’s seventh solo studio album but anthologizing material from across his output stretching back to his days as the art-rock guru frontman of Talking Heads, the show comes to Broadway following an extensive 2018 U.S.

It’s less a concert than a participatory religious experience, honoring the primal pleasures of music, dance and song as collective celebration, a rite to be savored more than ever in dark times. The sheer jubilation being transmitted by the performers, not to mention the dynamic staging, seems to demand a new kind of sensory intake.

Teaming up with a crew of 11 prodigiously talented and hard-working musicians, backup singers and dancers of diverse ages and ethnicities, Byrne gathers a vibrant community onstage, over which he presides as part professor, part preacher, part partying proletarian. Mike Nussbaum, Actor in 'Glengarry Glen Ross' and More for David Mamet, Dies at 99 This follows the section-by-section cerebral breakdown of the opening song, “Here.” That combined introduction serves as an implicit challenge to the audience - to rewire our brains, rendering them more elastic, capable of change and of receiving the multifarious signals of this astonishing show on different levels.

In the first of several playful ruminations that punctuate his exhilarating theatrical concert, American Utopia, David Byrne holds up a model of the human brain and ponders how the hundreds of millions of neuro connections in a baby’s gray matter get whittled down as we mature into adulthood, discarding the unnecessary and conserving only those needed to define who we are and how we perceive the world.

Review american utopia broadway