By Michele Markarian

“American Utopia”, by David Byrne. Choreography and Musical Staging by Annie-B Parsons.  Karl Mansfield and Mauro Rerosco, Music Director. Presented by Ambassador Theatre Group, Emerson Colonial Theatre, 106 Boylston Street, Boston through September 28.

As the lights go up on the stage, a barefoot David Byrne is seated at a table, wearing a light gray suit with contrasting gray shirt, and holding a replica of the human brain. In pleasant but measured tones he explains that babies’ brains have hundreds more neural connections than we do as adults.  Adults, he tells us, keep only the connections that are useful to us. The ones that are left define who we are as people. From this premise springs the rest of this amazing, undefinable event of music, movement, and speech. Over the course of 100 minutes, Byrne shares with us the connections that are important to him, while sharing the stage with eleven other similarly barefoot and clad multicultural musicians, singers and dancers. To say the piece has a narrative arc would be an overstatement, but we are treated to songs from Byrne’s oeuvre, including his first album since 2004, “American Utopia” (which is Byrne’s first album to make Billboard’s top ten), and snippets of stories from Byrne’s history. It’s a combination of cerebral and primitive.  In between the often sensual choreography, Byrne reflects on a number of things, including Kurt Schwitters, Hugo Ball, immigration and the need for political agency. 

Read more “The Unique Perspective of David Byrne’s “American Utopia””