david byrne american utopia broadway tickets

“I could see them listen to each other,” Ayla Huguenot, a seventeen-year-old musician in the audience, said of the band members. By the time Byrne sang the Talking Heads hit “Once in a Lifetime,” they relaxed.

Heads swivelled, as people reassured themselves that their neighbors had their masks on tightly enough. On the third night of the experiment, the audience, many of whom were double-masked, was palpably nervous. I’ve seen that couple at a previous show,” he said. He’d been pleased to see a lot of younger people in the audience lately, and he noticed that other, older fans had come more than once. “Remembering the music! Remembering the lyrics!” Byrne said on the Zoom, chuckling. And then each person put in a lot of time outside of that.” We’re doing songs that basically none of us, outside of David, have ever played before-like, thirteen new songs.” He went on, “We literally had eight hours of rehearsal the Sunday before and we had four hours the day of. Wooten, who has played with every version of the show, said that although they were using the same stage and some of the same people, “the show we’re putting on is completely different.

“It got hectic as fuck,” Bobby Wooten III, the bassist, said, on a separate Zoom call. “With fewer crew members, we could not do ‘Burning Down the House.’ That is a big one-very popular with the audience.” He continued, “Onstage, it’s ‘Look, we’re going to show you what’s possible.’ ” We said, ‘O.K., we can do this with the people we have left.’ ” He paused to adjust a strap on his blue-and-white striped overalls. In a recent Zoom call, Byrne explained how it happened: “We looked at the situation and we mapped it out. “This is our opportunity to make lemonade from COVID lemons.” “We’re just gonna come up with a show, you know? Hey!” he said.

Rather than close the show, Byrne announced on social media, “You can cash in your ticket, or you can have what’s behind this curtain,” which he billed as “a show you’ll never, ever see again.” He was offering a retooled “American Utopia,” featuring an assortment of songs reimagined by a scaled-back band of musicians. Too many cast and crew members had been sidelined by COVID, with seven testing positive, even though they’d been vaccinated. Not so long before, during the week leading up to Christmas, “American Utopia” ’s producers had cancelled five performances. The subtext, the audience understood, was “Treat yourself tonight, since the world is collapsing.” The joke, gift-wrapped as a question, needed no elaboration. David Byrne let his guitar slump on its strap for a moment, after opening his Broadway show, “American Utopia,” with a fiery rendition of “The Revolution.” He looked wearily into the audience and asked, “Wouldn’t it be heavenly if nothing ever happened?” People laughed.

David byrne american utopia broadway tickets