![]() The tempo kicked up with "Lazy," a tune reminiscent of old Talking Heads songs more band members appeared onstage, gigging in groups of twos and threes and leaving the center stage spotlight to Byrne. The slow, cerebral "Here" opened the show with Byrne singing alone onstage to a handheld brain halfway through his backup singers emerge from behind a metal ball chain curtain that serves as backdrop, eerily suggestive of two halves of the brain coming together. Out of the 21 songs performed, a third were from "American Utopia," and even if you'd never heard the album, the lighting effects, choreography and staging made even unfamiliar songs engaging. Yet even simple effects had impact - during "Blind," a single bright spotlight angled up from the floor transformed the performers into vast shadows, making Byrne appear long, lean, and as ageless as a 15-year old. During "I Should Watch TV," graduated stripes of deepening gray unfold as he makes his way to a flickering screen offstage, and in "Burning Down the House" the deep blue lighting ignites into a vivid red which flows like flames during the titular chorus. The precision mimics the lighting plot of a stage play and the storyteller in Byrne uses this to his advantage. The "American Utopia" tour - in support of Byrne's most recent album of the same name - uses wireless technology along with a tracking system connected to automated lighting that follows the performers onstage. Instead they moved, danced, and cavorted cord-free in a groundbreaking show that blended theater, shadowplay, dance and pantomime into a joyous, seemingly-carefree yet highly choreographed performance. Not once during the next 105 minutes did Byrne or his 11 band members stop, stand and sing and/or play from a fixed position for an entire song. It was slightly mind-blowing to realize this wasn't going to be a stand-your-ground kind of concert the musicians were free to move. Over the course of the next three songs, one by one nine musicians and two backup singers joined Byrne onstage, all of them in matching gray suits, all barefoot, all untethered like balloons that had escaped their strings. In his dapper suit, so elegant compared to his clownish big-shouldered costume in "Stop Making Sense," he has a bit of Bowie in him, the Bowie of the Thin White Duke years. His voice hasn't noticeably aged or lost its tone, quality or range. The setting brought to mind Spaulding Gray's "Swimming to Cambodia," a stage performance filmed in 1987 by director Jonathan Demme who - three years earlier - had made the documentary "Stop Making Sense," a live concert film featuring the Talking Heads.īut then the music began, Byrne started singing, and yes, it was a concert after all. As a theater reviewer called in at the last minute to review this show, I thought a mistake had been made in my favor. ![]() A table and chair had been brought in and that's where Byrne was seated when the lights went up. Half an hour earlier the opening band had stripped all their equipment from the stage, leaving empty floorspace. ![]() No musical equipment, no drum kit, no amplifiers, no cords or wires, just a stage mic curving alongside his face and a human brain in his outstretched hand. ![]() Instead, on a stage designed to look like a giant silver cube sat a man in a tailored grey suit, neat in appearance but incongruously barefoot. ![]() When David Byrne first appeared onstage at the Landmark Theater Wednesday night, he might have confused a few ticket holders expecting to see a rock concert. His hair is longer now, fashionably silver, his oversized suit permanently mothballed along with his 16-year career as the lead singer of the Talking Heads. ![]()
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