On January 6, David Byrne stopped by Late Night With Seth Meyers to talk about his current Broadway show, American Utopia.
Directed by Alex Timbers, the hybrid show marks the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer’s Broadway debut. And while he and his band have toured the country with the show, the Main Stem has been a new challenge. “It’s different in that I know that a Broadway audience expects something different,” Byrne told Meyers. “A Broadway audience says, ‘You gotta take us on a journey ... we wanna know why we're here.’ And I saw that as an opportunity.
“By the end, it's a much more emotional experience than the concerts are,” he said.
Meyers recently saw the show with a number of his comedian friends, including Jerry Seinfeld. Apparently, Seinfeld had a note for Byrne.
“The part in the show where I invite the audience to dance, I put a little joke at the end. What I used to say was, 'The fire department has asked you not to dance in the aisles because dancers in the aisles will have an unfair advantage in the event of a fire,’ and Jerry said afterwords, ‘No no no no, you can't put the joke in the middle of the sentence; the joke has to come at the end. The unfair advantage is the joke, just swap those phrases around.’ And damn, it worked.”
Watch the full interview in the video above.
