#AMERICAN UTOPIA BROADWAY PROMO CODE SERIES#

He set up a Dropbox and put in songs to create a set list. I’ll come up with a set list and send it to you tonight.” We started this communication for us to work back-and-forth. We could use some of the songs that we already know from the show, and David has so many songs in his Talking Heads and solo catalogue. Maybe we could do that again?” I was like, Wow, that would be amazing. He said, “We did this once, and there were some benefits, and we did it really well. It was just David playing guitar and singing, and I was playing a little percussion with him. To learn more about the feat, Refosco walked Vulture through the preparations in the week after pulling it off, while Byrne rested up before the show reopens (plugged back in) on January 5.ĭavid came to me and reminded me that we performed at Carnegie Hall a few years ago. That any of this occurred at all, though, is what’s most remarkable, given the cast and crew had only a six-day head start. The surprise inclusion of “Life During Wartime” had people dancing in the aisles, fire-marshal requests be damned. (But unlike Stop Making Sense, these “unplugged” shows weren’t even recorded for posterity.) Old songs were out new songs were in.

What ensued was a legitimately once-in-a-lifetime five-day slate of American Utopia shows, running from December 28 through January 2 - and marking perhaps the most exclusive series of performances Byrne has done since Stop Making Sense.

It came to the point where there were no more understudies.” Would they still be able to perform 17 songs, hell, any songs, with half of the performers out? “One by one, the cast started to get positive tests. “It was a little chaotic,” Refosco recalls of the team’s early days before being presented with this alternate idea. James, thanks to the creative ingenuity of its maestro, David Byrne, and musical director, Mauro Refosco: Working together remotely and in-person, the duo were able to reconfigure the show into an “unplugged” and “unchained” version on the fly that could successfully utilize their now vastly reduced crew. But American Utopia, despite its many temporarily fallen brethren in the Theater District, kept its lights on at the St. Well, that “return to normal” was short-lived by mid-December, both the city and state had logged a record number of positive cases, fueled by the arrival of Omicron. Doors wouldn’t partially reopen until the summer of 2021, returning to full-scale only by October. When the first wave of the coronavirus hit New York in early 2020, it shuttered Broadway indefinitely. An early performance of American Utopia: Unplugged.

#AMERICAN UTOPIA BROADWAY PROMO CODE SERIES#

American utopia broadway promo code