A filmed version of the musician’s hit Broadway show plays like a vibrant greatest hits extravaganza that could win converts
Spike Lee has made a filmed record of David Byrne’s Broadway stage-show version of his solo album American Utopia, a live reimagining of the record in which a lavish selection of his classic tracks with Talking Heads is also performed. So many, in fact, that it almost feels like a greatest hits extravaganza. Psycho Killer is excluded, but there are plenty of absolute bangers from yesteryear, and from an early stage in the proceedings, you can see members of the Broadway audience in the front row standing up and rocking out: people who have perhaps grown old with the great man himself and allowed their own hair to become as snowy as his. (Byrne looks more like Jim Jarmusch with each passing year.)
Byrne affects a conventional grey suit on stage, and his backing band of singers and dancers wear the same thing, perhaps to create a cloning effect. Inevitably, it will remind Byrne fans of the “big suit” he wore for the Stop Making Sense concert movie directed by Jonathan Demme in 1984 and there are similarities, although this show, like the suit, is consciously a more scaled-down, intimate affair.
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A filmed version of the musician’s hit Broadway show plays like a vibrant greatest hits extravaganza that could win convertsSpike Lee has made a filmed record of David Byrne’s Broadway stage-show version of his solo a...
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