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When Annie-B Parson was a kid grow-
ing up in Chicago in the ’70s, her
father didn’t take her to see musicals;
he took her to the ballet. This turned
out to be a relevant education for the
cofounder of Big Dance Theater, the
experimental company that injects
dance into theater and theater into
dance. It was at home that she watched
the midcentury classics. “I did love
them,” she says. “Those old dances, I
know them by heart”—and not just
the dances but everything about them.
“I was kind of addicted to them, until
I totally rejected them and got into
Talking Heads,” she says, laughing.
She is remembering all this in the
SoHo production studio of David
Byrne, her childhood idol turned
frequent creative collaborator, four
months before their latest project,
American Utopia, arrives on Broad-
way. It’s a hot summer day, and the
Talking Heads founder is walking
Parson through his gorgeous archive
of tapes, files, and art, to the office
in the back, where they are working
on the show’s transition from stage
to stage—in this case, from concert
venue to Broadway theater. They
speak like old friends, which, at this
point, they are.
When Parson brings up a childhood
love of Oklahoma!, Byrne interjects:
“Did you see the new version?”
“Yeah, so good, right?”
Byrne is nodding. “We’ll talk about
that later,” he says, smiling.
American Utopia, the 2018 album,
was Byrne’s first solo work in more
than a decade and his very first to hit
Billboard’s top ten. (It will perhaps
shock fans that prior to that, he had
reached only the number-15 slot in
1983, with the Talking Heads’ Speak-
ing in Tongues.) American Utopia, the
show, grew out of the subsequent
success of the concert tour, though
that tour was by no means typical.
Performances were choreographed by
Parson to be less rock show—i.e.,
drummer behind his drums, guitar
player cradling his instrument, singer
stoic behind his microphone stand—
and more of a multilayered perfor-
mance piece: a 12-person band, clad
in vaguely Maoist costumes, moving
through a shape-shifting chain-link
curtain. At some point during the tour,
people began to pull Byrne aside to
point out that his rock show felt like
a story. “They would say, ‘It’s there—
it’s hard to put into words, but we felt
it,’ ” he recalls, grinning.
The Broadway show—which opens
this month at the Hudson Theatre—
will be a new iteration of that glorified
concert: a series of songs performed
by a barefoot band, untethered and
able to move around the stage as a
dance troupe might. As Alex Timbers,
the show’s production consultant, puts
it: “It’s part rock concert, part theat-
rical spectacle, and part intimate
exploration of a major artist’s career.”
Performances begin with Byrne
seated alone at a small table, ponder-
ing the disconnections of the brain.
“Now, it feels like a bad connection,”
he sings. Although it has neither dia-
logue nor plot nor anything resem-
bling a typical narrative structure, the
show, you might say, is a search for
good connection, and it is not giving
too much away to say that at one
point, the cast poses with Byrne for
what resembles a family portrait (the
production was still being developed
through the summer). The protago-
nist is transformed, in other words,
by the people around him—though
you don’t want to push Byrne or Par-
son on what it all means. “We don’t
want to be reductive!” Parson says.
“We just want to bring it out a little
bit more,” Byrne adds, “but, without,
you know, putting a pin in it, without
putting a nose on the clown.”
Broadway loves noses on its clowns,
to put it mildly, but Broadway is also
lately in love with rock stars and pop
stars and what you might call musical
residencies. The past few years have
seen Bruce Springsteen, and more
recently Regina Spektor and Mor-
rissey, move into midtown venues. The
more traditional jukebox musical is on
something of an upswing as well, with
the Go-Go’s Head Over Heels; Ain’t
Too Proud—The Life and Times of the
Temptations; and Tina: The Tina Turn-
er Musical. Still to come this year is an
adaptation of Alanis Morissette’s
groundbreaking album Jagged Little
Pill, and next year, Girl From the North
Country, a Depression-era musical set
to the songs of Bob Dylan, is expect-
ed to arrive on Broadway. And then
there’s Hadestown, the album of neth-
erworld ballads from singer-song-
writer Anais Mitchell that is now a
Tony Award–winning musical. You
might say that Broadway is feeling
flexible, with members of the down-
town avant-garde regularly landing
real estate uptown. So as singular as
it seems, American Utopia might just
be the direction Broadway is going:
toward innovative performances that
move us in new and startling ways.
Growing up in suburban Maryland
in the ’60s, Byrne had, he recalls, zero
interest and little exposure to classical
American theater—save for a Broad-
way cast recording of The Sound of
Music that was a staple in his family’s
LP collection. He played in rock bands
in high school and college and, after a
stint at the Rhode Island School of
Design, started in 1975 what might be
called the ultimate art-rock band. The
Talking Heads not only gave us mini-
malist, near-punk hits (“Psycho Kill-
er,” “Once in a Lifetime,” and their Top
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