Art in the Orchard Covid Edition

 

ART IN THE ORCHARD

Park Hill Orchard

82 Park Hill Road, Easthampton, MA

Through November 28, 2021.

[Click on images for larger view]

 

It’s no secret that art and the Covid crisis have been troubled partners. On one hand, the lockdown gave artists more studio time to exercise their creative impulses. On the other, galleries and museums locked their doors and, even when they reopened, hours were reduced and there was fierce competition to secure exhibition space.

 

In the best of times, Art in the Orchard is a treat. This year it’s an especially sweet one, even though many of the artists on display quite naturally turned to the somber topic of reflecting upon Covid and its social and personal impact. It is, though, a comfortable event for the public as the artwork is spread in fields along either side of the road from the farm stand. If you want to buy some apples, cider, pie, or other goodies there is an outdoor setup where you can do so.

 

Here is a sampler of art that caught my eye:

 

 

 

When you park your car, you will see a wooden portal that frames a pumpkin patch with orchards behind them and Mt. Tom looming in the distance. Call it a metaphor for an Alice in Wonderland through-the-looking glass experience. On the other side of the road, a metallic bear greets you. If those aren’t enticing come-ons, you can’t be pleased so turn around and go home!

 

 

 

Michael Tillyer is the executive director of the New England Visionary Artist Museum in Northampton and a mainstay at Art in the Orchard. His whimsical sculptures are a delight and I’ve yet to encounter someone who looks at one of his carved dogs and doesn’t have an “Awwww!” moment.

 

 

 

Greenfield, MA artist Ted Hinman spent time reflecting upon our need to be better caretakers of the environment. On the surface, his “Garden of Delight” is a lot of fun and akin to rooting around in a toybox of discarded objects. Notice how he looked at a castoff baseball mitt and imagined a bee. The installation is loaded with eye candy, but he has his eye on bigger things, the aforementioned stewardship of the natural realm.

 

 

 

Brian McQuillen is another repeat artist. His “Vida” is its own statement. McQuillen works with “junk” metal and “Vida” is at once enticing and perplexing. There is the joy of the flute, but also the distress of viewing a figure that is the exoskeleton of something robotic yet vaguely human. Mixed message? I think that’s the point!

 

 

 

Easthampton’s Chris Woodman has fashioned a cyclopic eye for “Rise and Shine.” Try not to gaze into the giant eye that tops a monopod. Talk about grabbing your attention!

 

 

 

Florence, MA-based Dave Rothstein uses to wire and hay for “Hoo Goes There.” Spend some time with it as from a distance it’s not immediately clear that you are looking at nesting owls, some of whom are stretching their wings. Its ephemerality is the ultimate expression of organic art.

 

Covid has the sad distinction of being the deadliest pandemic in American history. Prior to that, it was the Spanish flu outbreak that took 675,00 American lives in 1919-20. It came on the heels of an even grimmer event: World War One. More than 20,000,000 died in the war (116,000 of whom were Americans). You might know Dr. John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Field,” which opens with the memorable lines: “In Flanders field the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row….” It commemorates the blood-soaked spot in Belgium where a particularly gruesome campaign took place. 

 

 

 

Eileen Travis of Poughkeepsie, NY connects the tragic dots between war, the influenza outbreak, and Covid through a simple act that is startingly profound. Travis crocheted a passel of red poppies and strewed them upon the verdant grass of the orchard grounds. Seldom has crochet been so deeply moving.

 

 

 

If you need a pick-me-up after that, wander over to “Geranium,” a cluster of pink flowers sewn from nylon flag material. It is the work of Grafton, MA artist Diana Shobrys. The actual grouping is large, but this closeup shows the richness of the color and the level of detail that went into each flower.

 

Believe me when I say that what I have displayed is but a small fraction of you will see, think, and imagine. And buy some apples!

 

Rob Weir

Eight Days a Week: The Beatles, Hope, and Chaos

 

 THE BEATLES: EIGHT DAYS A WEEK–THE TOURING YEARS

Directed by Ron Howard

Apple Corporation/Hulu, 97 minutes, PG.

★★★★

 

 

 

Like many people my age, The Beatles rocked my world. I was too young for Elvis and the pop music of the early ‘60s was so naff that I wasn’t sure what my pre-teen self was seeing when The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. It didn’t take long to fathom that music was undergoing a seismic shift. Whatever one thinks now, it’s hard to exaggerate how profoundly The Beatles altered the musical landscape.

 

The documentary Eight Days a Week first appeared in 2016. It won a Grammy for Best Music Film and a few Emmy Awards (sound editing, sound mixing), but didn’t have a broad theatrical run in North America due to the decline of independent cinemas and the generic preferences of mall theaters. If you’ve not seen Eight Days a Week, you should. That’s especially the case if you’ve seen either A Hard Day’s Night or Help. Both of those were directed by Richard Lester, who reminds us that though the lads had a blast making the films, it didn’t take a creative genius to imagine the mayhem depicted in them.

 

Eight Days a Week mostly covers the years 1962-66, when The Beatles were at their peak popularity, dominated the pop charts, and toured constantly. You will notice it’s rated PG. The Beatles were a breath of fresh air in the United States. The arrived in 1964, just 11 weeks after President Kennedy’s assassination. Many elders were horrified, but their mop top haircuts, Edwardian suits, goofy charm, and earworm music exuded innocence and restoration for millions of young people. Director Ron Howard’s film captures this, along with what might be called safety valve hysteria, a combination mob scene and screamfest. Ringo recalls that the 1966 Shea Stadium show was so loud and the sound production so primitive–amps were funneled through the stadium’s PA system—that he couldn’t hear a thing and needed visual cues from his bandmates to figure out the beat.

 

Luckily for us that Giles Martin–son of The Beatles’ late producer George Martin–remastered the soundtrack. Also lucky for us, Howard worked with Apple. Ever notice how many music documentaries have short bursts of the original songs that are often sung by someone else? That’s because securing rights without paying a king’s ransom in royalties must fall within strict fair use standards. Howard had no such restraints. He also got permission to mine archival material from Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, plus Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison. This makes Howard’s film a musical treat and opens windows for revelations.

 

He stumbles on the revelations; it’s hard to say anything new about a band so well covered. We know, for instance, that The Beatles didn’t come from “nowhere;” three of them had been playing since they were teens. We know about their Berlin gigs and that Ringo replaced Pete Best as drummer and became a stabilizing force. We’ve also heard them credit Brian Epstein with remaking their image. We even know about the mania that followed the band wherever they went. Seeing it on film, though–carefully curated and edited by Paul Crowder–certainly makes one wonder how the four tolerated the craziness.

 

The answer is that The Beatles were young. Eight Days a Week is also a boys-to-men film. Being mobbed by teenaged (or not!) groping girls when you’re 21 is one thing; it wears thin when you hit the mid-20s. Howard suggests that The Beatles were loved to death. Their August 29, 1966, Candlestick Park show is often cited as their last concert. That’s not quite true; Howard’s film ends with a coda of their January 29, 1969, rooftop concert atop Apple Corps–literally the last time The Beatles played live. After Candlestick, though, they stopped touring. Paul recalled they were so weary by 1966, that they went into the studio, chose not to be The Beatles, and were reborn as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Clubs Band.

 

Like most documentaries, this one has talking heads. The archival interviews and commentary stand out more, though Whoopi Goldberg speaks very eloquently of how the band represented a giddy moment of color-blind hope that she cherishes to this day. Some of the others–Eddie Izzard, Elvis Costello, touring manager Neil Aspinall–say about what you’d expect, and I’m not sure why gadfly Malcolm Gladwell was interviewed. Mostly, the film moves at a fast clip in keeping with how the ambiguously labeled “Sixties” unfolded. I often used images and clips of the 1962 and 1967 Beatles to drive home to students the speed of social change during the decade. Indeed, it wasn’t just The Beatles who were pushed to the edge by that surging surf. See Eight Days a Week–available on DVD or streaming–and realize what I mean, as you sing along to some of the most infectious songs ever recorded.

 

Rob Weir

Eight Perfect Murders: Breezy Read, Flawed Whodunit

 

EIGHT PERFECT MURDERS (2021)

By Peter Swanson

William Morrow, 274 pages.

★★★

 

 

The premise of Peter Swanson’s mystery is emblazoned on its cover: “How do you get away with murder? Make it look impossible.” Of course, that’s often the case for murder mysteries, which is why we need a Holmes, a Poirot, or a Marple to unravel how the unlikely is exactly what happened.

 

Malcolm Kershaw loves books like that. He’s been a disappointment to many–a 1999 college grad who never grew up. He loved lurid mystery novels as a kid, started collecting them then, and began working in bookshops as soon as he graduated from college. His one major accomplishment was that he bought the shop in which the previous proprietor created a job for him, Old Devils Bookstore on Boston’s Beacon Hill, though Malcolm hasn’t exactly transformed it into a howling success. Out of the blue, FBI Special Agent Gwen Mulvey pops into the store to ask for his help. She ran across a blog he wrote for the store years earlier in which he wrote about eight books with “perfect murders.” His selections were idiosyncratic and Mulvey believes that a serial killer has been using it a blueprint. Malcolm protests he only wrote blog posts to drum up business for the previous owner, but Mulvey seems desperate.

 

Hers is the ultimate fishing expedition, but Malcolm hasn’t had much of a life since his drug-addled wife died in a car crash five years earlier; his two employees are younger, and the store cat, Nero, is his closest companion. Most nights, Malcolm has a few drinks and heads home to his attic apartment, which is crammed with old mysteries. So, needless to say, he didn’t play hard-to-get when Mulvey asked for his help. The more we learn about Malcolm, the more he emerges as a sad sack–the kind that would marry a woman he knew to be a free-spirit and addict. Not even his drinking acquaintances qualify as friends; he’s more like wallpaper for the watering holes he frequents. He does get suspicious, though, when some of the victims had tangential ties to Old Devils and begins to suspect that Mulvey has ulterior motives.

 

Eight Perfect Murders veers in directions that involve the dark Web, exchange murders, a busybody ex-cop, and a few too many coincidences for comfort. It gets weirder still when Mulvey is suspended and the murder cases are handed off to two new agents. As is often the case in mysteries, this one also involves the Pandora’s Box Syndrome; that is, key individuals open doors and investigations that are beyond their capacity to control.   

 

At this juncture I should say that Eight Perfect Murders is a breezy read, but a flawed whodunit. I soused out the killer long before the short novel concluded and read on merely to see how Swanson dotted the I’s and crossed the T’s. If you are a fan of classic detective fiction, your greatest pleasure will be contemplating the numerous mentioned works and plots within the main novel. By about the two-thirds mark, though, Swanson strains to maintain tension and it becomes more and more obvious who we need to watch and who we can safely ignore. Were it not for an ambiguous ending, I think I would have felt cheated.

 

You probably don’t need me to tell you that the novel’s title is ironic. Murder is always messy; there’s no such thing as a “perfect” murder, even if the culprit manages to elude arrest. 

 

Rob Weir

Twentieth Century Howlingly Funny

 

TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934)

Directed by Howard Hawks

Columbia Pictures, 91 minutes, Pre-Code (not-rated)

★★★★★

 

 

 

It’s usually not a good thing when actors are accused of “chewing the scenery.” Then again, few actors are Lionel Barrymore or Carole Lombard. In 1934, they split a meal of film stock and made Twentieth Century, one of the funniest screwball comedies of all time.

 

Oscar Jaffe (Barrymore) is an egotistical theatre director/producer/company leader whom we first observe driving two longtime assistants crazy: his accountant, Oliver Webb (Walter Connolly) and Owen O’Malley (Roscoe Karns). In O’Malley’s case, he’s literally driven to drink. The latest camel-breaking straw is a rehearsal in which Jaffe is trying to explain blocking to his new “find,” Mildred Plotka (Lombard), who is better qualified to be a blockhead. Oliver and Owen know why he’s insistent upon schooling her; she’s a lingerie model.

 

Yet, Jaffe turns her into a star under the name of Lily Garland and they make several smash hits together. He’s too much the jealous tyrant, though, and Lily decides to go her own way upon discovering Oscar hired a detective (Edgar Kennedy*) to shadow her. As her star rises, Oscar’s sinks and the 1930s is no time to for egg-laying turkeys. Jaffe tries to create news stars but, as Oliver informs him, he can’t get backing for another flop. Oscar smells opportunity though, when he learns that Lily is on the same train as he. (The movie title derives from the Twentieth Century Limited, which plied the rails from Chicago to New York.)

 

This sets the table for a farce filled with opening and closing suite doors, exasperated characters, pratfalls, feigned injuries, and grand gestures. Oscar assumes roles such as concerned friend, suitor, wounded impresario, and schemer extraordinaire—all of which drives poor Owen deeper into his flask and the pragmatic Oliver to claw at what little hair he has left. Oscar’s goal, of course, is to lure Lily back into the fold. All he needs is to dispose of her snooty fiancé (Ralph Farber), convince Lily to rebuff an offer from his theatre rival Max Jacobs (Charles Lane), and find oodles of cash for a new production. And, of course, he needs both a concept and a script. As if there wasn’t enough mayhem, some wacko is slinking up and down the train plastering evangelical stickers on every available surface.

 

Twentieth Century is sassy, barbed, and rip-roaring funny. Barrymore* mastered the double take and had more histrionic gestures in his bag of tricks than there are stars in the Milky Way. He and Lombard also understood a basic tenet of broad comedy: if you’re going to be outrageous, go whole hog. Lombard’s “Lily” can match Barrymore’s “Oscar” vanity for vanity, ego for ego, and lie for lie.

 

They must have had a blast doing this film. The script from the exceptionally talented and rightly renowned Ben Hecht—with assistance from Charles MacArthur—is sharp and expertly timed. It’s one of those rare films in which even those in bit roles—Connolly, Karns, Billie Seward as Lily’s beleaguered maid, and Etienne Giradot as Matthew J. Clark—play their parts so well that they enhance the madness rather than appearing as mere props for the principals or background wallpaper. Twentieth Century is a model for how to make a broad comedy without descending to the lowest common denominator. Hats off also to director Howard Hawks, perhaps the best screwball comedy director in film history not named Frank Capra. Some, me included, prefer Hawks because he was less sugary.

 

Twentieth Century is nearly 90 years old, but its humor is both well-timed and timeless. Watch it. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

 

Rob Weir

 

*Note: Groucho Marx played the role of Oscar Jaffe in a summer stock staging. Groucho wanted to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor, and apparently played Jaffe that way. Interesting choice, but Barrymore owns the role. In another tidbit, Edward Kennedy was the heavy in several Marx Brothers films, including Duck Soup in which he was the lemonade vendor befuddled by Harpo. 

Oh William!= Oh, No, not More Lucy Barton!

 

 

OH WILLIAM!  (October, 2021)

By Elizabeth Strout

Random House, 221 pages.

★★

 

 

Fiction writers often say that their characters “surprised” them. It’s a mysterious-sounding but accurate way of saying that the logic of the narrative forces writers to consider what a character would do in a particular circumstance. In that sense, characters evolve personalities that are not necessarily how a writer first imagined them. That’s among the reasons why characters return for a second act, or a third or more. John Updike famously penned a tetralogy and a novella spotlighting Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom and won Pulitzer Prizes for two of them. It’s important, though, to know when to part with a character.

 

 Elizabeth Strout wrote two Olive Kitteridge novels, won a Pulitzer for the first, and praise for the second. In 2016, she published the acclaimed My Name is Lucy Barton and followed the next year with Anything is Possible. Now, four years later, Oh William! is book three of the Lucy Barton cycle, though it’s ostensibly about her aging first husband. I was underwhelmed by Anything is Possible and less so by Oh William! One reason is that I find Lucy as relentlessly annoying as William is self-centered. Though she’s now in her 60s, a feted author, and the mother with two adult daughters, she remains a girl-woman. Were this a male character, I’m sure some reviewers would be screaming, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, grow up.”

 

Those who’ve followed Lucy know about her impoverished childhood and emotionally distant parents. Having grown up financially strapped myself, I’d not deny that such experiences can scar and carry over into adulthood, but most of us manage to move on. Not Lucy. As we meet her now, she’s recently widowed. Her first husband, William Gerhardt, now wants more from Lucy, though not in the way you might think.

 

William, an accomplished parasitologist, still goes to his university lab every day, though he no longer teaches. At 70, he’s not the womanizer he used to be either, but he remains the same emotionally challenged egoist that prompted Lucy to walk out on him and her young family decades earlier. He’s partnerless again as Estelle, his third wife, has left him. Although Lucy and William remained friends–he calls her “Button” and he is “Pillie” to her–neither is looking for any sort of made-for-each-other redemptive winter romance. What William really wants is for Lucy to go northern Maine with him.

 

Courtesy of an Ancestry.com gift from one of his daughters, William has learned he has a half-sister. He has no idea what he wants to do with that information except make his way to Houlton, a down-on-its-heels town on the U.S./Canada border in the middle of potato country. He hopes to figure out his next step when he gets there. Inexplicably, Lucy agrees to come along. There’s really not much to suggest why she would do so, other than the fact that his late mother, Caroline Trask Gerhardt, was one of Lucy’s early adult mentors.

 

The trip to northern Maine yields surprises about Caroline, William’s German father, and his half-sister, though surprisingly little about our two protagonists. Suffice it to say that those old enough to remember the Gerhardts don’t have much good to say about them, and that includes Lois, William’s previously unknown sibling. Alas, William and Lucy are the same woe-is-me whiny individuals we’ve seen before. I doubt it was Strout’s intention, but this part of the novel’s most revealing parts concern how places such as Bangor, Presque Isle, Fort Fairfield, and Houlton are closer to despair than to the American Dream.

 

The book’s title reflects the fact that Lucy repeatedly utters the phrase “Oh William!” She uses it to express surprise, sympathy, frustration, and futility. From this reader’s perspective, this repetition is more of a reflection upon a paucity of fresh ideas than any sort of emotional roller coaster. Still another indication is that Strout resorts to having Lucy explain things by referencing her novels; that is, she’s speaking in Strout’s voice rather than her own. Strout seeks to build parallels between Caroline and Lucy, but it ends up as a mechanistic contrivance rather than probing Lucy’s psyche. Perhaps that’s because Lucy doesn’t have much depth. For a character who has allegedly become a renowned author who has traveled extensively and feels at home among the chaos of New York City, Lucy is akin to a frightened gray rabbit. Lucy Barton was interesting to contemplate the first time, but not a second or third. Strout needs to move on. Lucy Barton is no Rabbit Angstrom.

 

Rob Weir  

The Lowering Days a Stunning Debut

 

 

 

THE LOWERING DAYS (2021)

By Gregory Brown

Harper, 268 pages.

★★★★★

 

Lowering days are those of gloom and foreboding. One origin story, possibly apocryphal, holds that the phrase came from the spring day on which those who died in winter were removed from storage and buried. Gregory Brown's stunning debut novel borrows the concept for a ghost story without ghosts. It’s a spin-the-generations story about violence that reaches across time to look at debts never fully repaid and hard deaths in a hard place.

 

Brown hails from the Penobscot River basin of northeast Maine. The river bears the name of Native Americans who, along with the Passamaquoddy peoples, were the original inhabitants of the land. They still reside there, as do numerous mixed blood individuals. Courtesy of Maine’s Indian Land Claims Act of 1980, they stand to reclaim vast tracts of the sparsely populated region southeast of Bangor.

 

Brown’s protagonists are the Ames and Creel families. David Almerin (“Almy”) Ames narrates events we infer occurred in the 1980s. He is one of three sons born to Arnoux and Falon, he a Vietnam war deserter-turned-boatmaker, and she an attractive woman with a spine of steel who starts a local newspaper titled The Lowering Days. Lyman was a war hero, the father of two–daughter Wren and son Galen–and is husband to Grace, also a stalwart presence though she was something of a rebound wife. During their shared adolescence, Falon was pursued by three boys: Arnoux, Lyman, and Billy Jupiter who was part Native American. In the logic of small-town USA, Arnoux is now more popular because he made amends with his past through his craft, and Lyman is forever known as “Indian Killer because of a single drunken night in which all three boys were goofing around a cliffside raven-filled apple tree known as the Ghost Tree. They were trying to impress Falon, but Lyman's antics sent Billy over the side. In the here and now, Arnoux and Lyman barely tolerate one another.

 

Not much happens in such a hardscrabble region, but Japanese investors have shown interest in buying a long closed papermill. That is, until Molly, a 14-year-old native girl inflamed by environmentalism and an understanding of history, burns down the mill in protest for how it poisoned Penobscot waters. It probably would have been an unsolved crime had Molly not written an unsigned letter to the paper. Should Falon publish it? She knows that doing so has a high possibility of providing locals with enough clues to implicate Molly and maybe put her life at risk. There’s also the fact that family friend Moses Jupiter, a distant relative of Billy, is Molly's grandfather.

 

Many subplots emerge from this setup. Molly and her father Adam are on the lam in an area described as "water and wind so heavy and present, you screamed to escape it." The feud between Arnoux and Lyman reopens, spins out of control, and filters down to some of their children. Among other things, Arnoux’s sons Simon and Link commit an unthinkable act in a region in which fishing is the only real livelihood. How to heal such rifts? How to keep Molly safe? Lyman doesn't help matters when he lets his anger get the better of him and reminds locals of his old nickname.

 

The Lowering Days is so rich and so vivid that it's very hard to summarize it. Its themes and props include recurrent patterns of losing parents, premature death, mystical links to ancestors, banshees that cross oceans, cycles repeated and broken, race, fragmented love, ravens, a Penobscot legend of a woman who cut her husband to pieces in the name of love, and individuals pushed beyond their limits. Above all, it's a coming-of-age tale that could be subtitled “How Almy Became David.”

 

David's path to becoming a doctor begins when his uncle Reggie rebuilds a cabin near East Grand Lake Falls Lake on the Maine/New Brunswick border. David has serious issues to work out and a stint as a clinic doctor in the middle of nowhere helps. But this is by no means a summation or even a major theme, aside from a more general one of hurt, healing and redemption.

 

By far the most spectacular thing about a novel lies with Brown’s elegiac tone, which transforms remote places into a mystical and magical lands. The book is also filled with wisdom. When Arnoux explains to his children why he abased himself to Lyman he explains, “Because I want you to be able to remember what the right thing looks like.” David comes to grips with inner hurt when he begins to realize, “Sometimes love can't call love back…. People come and go and sometimes the debt to the departed ones long outlast their presence.” Moses punctuates this when he remarks, “Death is a circle. But they made it a line. Over time the link between the world of the living and the world of the dead got broken in people’s minds.” Reading The Lowering Days will help you repair that misconception.

 

Rob Weir

September 2021 Artist of the Month: David Byrne

 

DAVID BRYNE’S AMERICAN UTOPIA (2021)

Directed by Spike Lee

HBO and Universal Pictures, 105 minutes, Not-rated

 

For September’s Artist of the Month, here’s something different, yet familiar. David Byrne has been a household name since his days as lead singer and guitarist for Talking Heads. In case you weren’t into post-punk music—yours truly went full folk and Celtic for much of the 1980s—Talking Heads was perhaps the most beloved of “new wave” bands. New wave groups took punk’s DYI approach to music, but didn’t totally reject commercial rock and pop. It mined them and created an arty hybrid.

 

Talking Heads recorded eight albums before disbanding in 1991. Byrne subsequently busied himself with solo albums, collaborative work with artists such as Brian Eno and St Vincent, and scores for everything from TV and film to dance and art installations. American Utopia was his 10^th solo album and inspired a Broadway musical of the same name. In 2020, Byrne joined forces with director Spike Lee to film the show, which went into (very) limited theatrical release before being released on HBO. The limited release was probably designed not to harm the theatre box office, but the show has been a smash hit and opened a new season earlier this month. For those who don’t live in the Big Apple or don’t wish to sell body parts to buy Broadway tickets, Spike Lee’s film is the next best thing to seeing Byrne in concert.

 

Posters for the play generally render the word Utopia upside down. In many ways that’s appropriate. Although the Scottish-born Byrne has long been a US citizen and a devoted New Yorker, the play is simultaneously critical and optimistic. As he puts it, “We need to change. I need to change.” Appropriately, he utters this before launching into “Hell You Talmbout,” a Janelle Monáe song and litany of black people unjustly killed, such as Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and Trayvon Martin. If this sounds as if Byrne is getting political, it’s not that simple. The show opens with him holding a (rubber) brain and musing on connections, including brain pathways, the molecular structure of the universe, and those between people. Byrne wants to explore ways in which we can become more fully human. The tone is set by the second song, the Talking Head’s “I Know Sometimes a Man is Wrong/Don’t Worry about the Government.” Byrne wants us to save ourselves from everything from climate change and racism to arrogance, isolation, and being lazy (including intellectual and moral laziness.) 

 

The show, the film, and the music are jaw-dropping amazing. The play is not the same as the album. There are 21 songs plus a reprise of “Everybody’s Coming to My House,” the hit single from the American Utopia album, but only five songs come from that recording. The production makes you think, makes you anxious, makes you want to purify your social sins, and makes you boogie. It includes eight Talking Heads songs—including “Burn Down the House–and before the curtain drops, audience members are literally dancing in the aisles. All of the songs were penned by Byrne except the aforementioned Monáe composition and Fatboy Slim’s “Toe Jam.”

 

The production dazzles. Choreography was done by Brooklyn-based dancer and producer Annie-B Parson and is full of energy, verve, and nods to marching bands. Byrne loves marching bands, so his musicians are untethered. Thanks to wireless technology, even electric keyboards, bass, and electric guitar are free to roam. So too are the percussionists. All 12 cast members bang, scrape, or shake percussion instruments at some point, but half of them are primarily drummers. Lee’s overhead and back-of-stage camera work highlights both the simple (line marches) and the complex (weaves, zigzags). And let’s give a shout out to the principal dancers and backup singers, the lithe and stunning Tendayi Kuumba and the incredible Chris Giarmo. I don’t know why the bearded Giarmo is so heavily made up, but his pas de deux with Kuumba are so well-executed that they make Dancing with the Stars look like a junior high sock hop. Also heap praise on cinematographer Ellen Kuras, who makes us aware of the dynamic stage lighting that enhances American Utopia.

 

Byrne is, of course, front and center of the suited but barefooted ensemble. He is the draw and lead vocalist, but he’s also a fully engaged cast member. When he sings “I Dance Like This,” he indeed moves well for a 69-year-old, but he knows he’s no Kuumba or Giarmo. Our ears are on Byrne, but our eyes on the professional dancers, and the groove comes from Karl Mansfield’s portable keyboard, Bobby Wooten III’s bass, and Angie Swan’s electric guitars. Everyone sings. Byrne remains in fine voice, though there is a notable falloff in places, understandable for a soon-to-be septuagenarian.

 

You might not notice that last point and who could fault you? I return to the point that Byrne wants us to enjoy ourselves and to think. That continues through the coda, where he leads the entire bundled up crew for a post-show winter bike ride through the theatre district. Byrne’s both an avid cyclist and an advocate of a post-fossil fuels world. The only sour note is the pre-film “conversation” between Lee and Byrne. If only it had been. It was more a short-on-information mutual admiration/chuckle fest that stands in marked contrast to the show’s carefully constructed arc. It’s a good time to grab a bowl of snacks, sit back, and prepare to get connected. You will come away hopeful that our upside-down utopia can be righted.

 

Rob Weir