THEATER REVIEW | 'AMERICAN IDIOT'
Staging Youth’s Existential Quest With Green Day Variations
BERKELEY, Calif. - Options for the future appear limited for the idle young men depicted with harsh conviction in the arresting new musical “American Idiot” at Berkeley Repertory Theater here. They can choose to get high, go to war or sink permanently into the couch.
None of these promises much in the way of happiness, but then these dead-eyed suburban slackers - bored, disaffected, cynical about their own cynicism - hardly have the energy for grabbing brass rings. “I don’t care if you don’t care,” they sing, punching one another’s shoulders listlessly. That catchy chorus typifies their default attitude to life in 21st-century America. Raised in front of glowing screens, their experience mediated by technology, they abdicate responsibility even for their own affectlessness, and expect everyone else to feel the same way.
“American Idiot,” which is inspired by and includes all the music from the hugely popular 2004 album of the same title from the trio Green Day, is that rare and tricky creature, a true rock opera. Directed with polish and precision by Michael Mayer (“Spring Awakening”), who collaborated with Billie Joe Armstrong, the band’s frontman and lyricist, on the fragments of monologue that constitute the book, it expresses its vision through the weaving together of songs from the album, as well as a few B sides and four selections from the band’s newest collection, “21st Century Breakdown.”
This tight musical integrity is the show’s singular, invigorating asset. But for those unfamiliar with or unengaged by Green Day’s driving pop-punk music, it is also an obvious liability. You can justly take issue with characters who lack much in the way of emotional depth or specificity, and plotlines that are simple to the point of crudity. But the lack of a lucid book is also integral to the show’s meaning. The young men in “American Idiot” symbolize a generation that mistrusts words and doesn’t use them with any particular grace or conviction.
For them language is empty slogans on a TV screen or a propaganda poster, and they have lost the thread of the American fable, the one about the kid from a nuclear family in the ’burbs who follows the path of upward mobility and in turn begets his own happy family. The only words that speak to these drive-deprived postadolescents are the ones screeched or crooned over a snarl of electric guitar or a frantic drumbeat. They live immured inside the songs of rage and scorn and yearning that give life what meager meaning it has. Naturally, the most successful relationship depicted in the show is the fruitful intimacy between the central character, Johnny (John Gallagher Jr.), and his beat-up guitar.
This distrust of (and disgust with) the way language is manipulated today is signaled when we hear the voice of George W. Bush as the curtain slowly rises: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” It doesn’t take long to figure out which side the boys in “American Idiot” are on: nobody’s, maybe not even their own.
To the title tune, they stage a raucous temper tantrum (the febrile choreography is by Steven Hoggett, of “Black Watch”) on a set by Christine Jones that is both spectacular and scummy. A wall plastered with punk band posters stretches up a good 50 feet, pockmarked by television screens of various vintages that crackle with images spliced together from newscasts and tabloid shows. The furniture on view: a grotty couch, a messy bed, a recliner. What more does a 21st-century loser need?
Line by line, Mr. Armstrong’s lyrics, like the words to many (if not most) contemporary pop songs, do not stand up to rigorous exegesis. It often seems as if they were written “on a steady diet of soda pop and Ritalin,” to borrow one of his more pungent phrases, with their forced rhymes, confused grammar and imagery that is either obscure or clotted with grandiosity and angsty clichés. But when laid over the band’s lushly melodic music - all those knife-sharp riffs can’t disguise Green Day’s potent gift for irresistible tunes - they deliver enough information to transmit the emotional contours of the story the show aims to tell.
The music, terrifically orchestrated by Tom Kitt (the Tony-winning composer of “Next to Normal”), is played with impressive meticulousness and raw power by a band of eight onstage musicians.
As the show begins, Johnny, embodied with sweaty, hunched intensity by the always affecting Mr. Gallagher, and his two best buddies, Will (Michael Esper) and Tunny (the understudy Ben Thompson, at the reviewed performance), are preparing to leave behind the empty shallows of suburbia for the “dawning of the rest of our lives.” At the last minute Will backs out, when his girlfriend, Heather (Mary Faber), reveals that she’s pregnant. For him tomorrow’s sun will rise on the couch he just got up from.
Johnny and Tunny don’t fare much better in the big city. Johnny is lovestruck when he glimpses an exotic girl (Rebecca Naomi Jones) in an apartment window from the street. But his affections are soon divided between his new love and an equally potent seducer, the drug pusher St. Jimmy (Tony Vincent, louche and compelling, and the evening’s strongest vocalist).
Meanwhile, Tunny wakes up one day in a dazed stupor, turns on the television and is soon mesmerized by visions of sequined U.S.O. dancing girls and a muscular figure who turns out to be an Army recruiter; next thing he knows, Tunny is being marched off to war.
DNA from the rock musicals that have come before can be identified in the chromosomes of “American Idiot.” The corruptor St. Jimmy is a gender-switched (but just barely) version of the Acid Queen from “The Who’s Tommy.” The druggy duet shared by Johnny and his girlfriend, and their club-hopping number too, are redolent of “Rent.” The show’s focus on tormented youth and its doomy intensity suggests “Spring Awakening,” from which Mr. Mayer profitably recycles a staging trick or two, including a rising platform and the onstage band.
But “American Idiot” also has its own voice: bitter and melancholy, attuned to an era more doubting than hopeful. Perhaps most strongly - and promisingly? - the show’s story of young men on a confused search for themselves during a time of changing social mores and foreign wars recalls “Hair,” the musical about the make-love-not-war generation that’s currently a big hit in revival on Broadway. (Both musicals also do most of their storytelling in song.)
That musical’s warm embrace has been replaced by an alienated scowl, of course. And yet when Johnny finds himself back at home at the end of “American Idiot,” with nothing to show for the years of anxious searching that have passed, I was moved just as I was by the turbulent wanderings of those hippie adventurers of the Vietnam era. (“American Idiot” could be called “Hair” with a buzz cut, a nose ring and a bad attitude.)
Mournful as it is about the prospects of 21st-century Americans, the show possesses a stimulating energy and a vision of wasted youth that holds us in its grip. And to ring a variation on the Woody Allen joke about sex being dirty if you’re doing it right, the only thing sadder than wasting your youth is not wasting it.
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BERKELEY, Calif. - Options for the future appear limited for the idle young men depicted with harsh conviction in the arresting new musical “American Idiot” at Berkeley Repertory Theater here. They can choose to get high, go to war or sink permanently into the couch.
None of these promises much in the way of happiness, but then these dead-eyed suburban slackers - bored, disaffected, cynical about their own cynicism - hardly have the energy for grabbing brass rings. “I don’t care if you don’t care,” they sing, punching one another’s shoulders listlessly. That catchy chorus typifies their default attitude to life in 21st-century America. Raised in front of glowing screens, their experience mediated by technology, they abdicate responsibility even for their own affectlessness, and expect everyone else to feel the same way.
“American Idiot,” which is inspired by and includes all the music from the hugely popular 2004 album of the same title from the trio Green Day, is that rare and tricky creature, a true rock opera. Directed with polish and precision by Michael Mayer (“Spring Awakening”), who collaborated with Billie Joe Armstrong, the band’s frontman and lyricist, on the fragments of monologue that constitute the book, it expresses its vision through the weaving together of songs from the album, as well as a few B sides and four selections from the band’s newest collection, “21st Century Breakdown.”
This tight musical integrity is the show’s singular, invigorating asset. But for those unfamiliar with or unengaged by Green Day’s driving pop-punk music, it is also an obvious liability. You can justly take issue with characters who lack much in the way of emotional depth or specificity, and plotlines that are simple to the point of crudity. But the lack of a lucid book is also integral to the show’s meaning. The young men in “American Idiot” symbolize a generation that mistrusts words and doesn’t use them with any particular grace or conviction.
For them language is empty slogans on a TV screen or a propaganda poster, and they have lost the thread of the American fable, the one about the kid from a nuclear family in the ’burbs who follows the path of upward mobility and in turn begets his own happy family. The only words that speak to these drive-deprived postadolescents are the ones screeched or crooned over a snarl of electric guitar or a frantic drumbeat. They live immured inside the songs of rage and scorn and yearning that give life what meager meaning it has. Naturally, the most successful relationship depicted in the show is the fruitful intimacy between the central character, Johnny (John Gallagher Jr.), and his beat-up guitar.
This distrust of (and disgust with) the way language is manipulated today is signaled when we hear the voice of George W. Bush as the curtain slowly rises: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” It doesn’t take long to figure out which side the boys in “American Idiot” are on: nobody’s, maybe not even their own.
To the title tune, they stage a raucous temper tantrum (the febrile choreography is by Steven Hoggett, of “Black Watch”) on a set by Christine Jones that is both spectacular and scummy. A wall plastered with punk band posters stretches up a good 50 feet, pockmarked by television screens of various vintages that crackle with images spliced together from newscasts and tabloid shows. The furniture on view: a grotty couch, a messy bed, a recliner. What more does a 21st-century loser need?
Line by line, Mr. Armstrong’s lyrics, like the words to many (if not most) contemporary pop songs, do not stand up to rigorous exegesis. It often seems as if they were written “on a steady diet of soda pop and Ritalin,” to borrow one of his more pungent phrases, with their forced rhymes, confused grammar and imagery that is either obscure or clotted with grandiosity and angsty clichés. But when laid over the band’s lushly melodic music - all those knife-sharp riffs can’t disguise Green Day’s potent gift for irresistible tunes - they deliver enough information to transmit the emotional contours of the story the show aims to tell.
The music, terrifically orchestrated by Tom Kitt (the Tony-winning composer of “Next to Normal”), is played with impressive meticulousness and raw power by a band of eight onstage musicians.
As the show begins, Johnny, embodied with sweaty, hunched intensity by the always affecting Mr. Gallagher, and his two best buddies, Will (Michael Esper) and Tunny (the understudy Ben Thompson, at the reviewed performance), are preparing to leave behind the empty shallows of suburbia for the “dawning of the rest of our lives.” At the last minute Will backs out, when his girlfriend, Heather (Mary Faber), reveals that she’s pregnant. For him tomorrow’s sun will rise on the couch he just got up from.
Johnny and Tunny don’t fare much better in the big city. Johnny is lovestruck when he glimpses an exotic girl (Rebecca Naomi Jones) in an apartment window from the street. But his affections are soon divided between his new love and an equally potent seducer, the drug pusher St. Jimmy (Tony Vincent, louche and compelling, and the evening’s strongest vocalist).
Meanwhile, Tunny wakes up one day in a dazed stupor, turns on the television and is soon mesmerized by visions of sequined U.S.O. dancing girls and a muscular figure who turns out to be an Army recruiter; next thing he knows, Tunny is being marched off to war.
DNA from the rock musicals that have come before can be identified in the chromosomes of “American Idiot.” The corruptor St. Jimmy is a gender-switched (but just barely) version of the Acid Queen from “The Who’s Tommy.” The druggy duet shared by Johnny and his girlfriend, and their club-hopping number too, are redolent of “Rent.” The show’s focus on tormented youth and its doomy intensity suggests “Spring Awakening,” from which Mr. Mayer profitably recycles a staging trick or two, including a rising platform and the onstage band.
But “American Idiot” also has its own voice: bitter and melancholy, attuned to an era more doubting than hopeful. Perhaps most strongly - and promisingly? - the show’s story of young men on a confused search for themselves during a time of changing social mores and foreign wars recalls “Hair,” the musical about the make-love-not-war generation that’s currently a big hit in revival on Broadway. (Both musicals also do most of their storytelling in song.)
That musical’s warm embrace has been replaced by an alienated scowl, of course. And yet when Johnny finds himself back at home at the end of “American Idiot,” with nothing to show for the years of anxious searching that have passed, I was moved just as I was by the turbulent wanderings of those hippie adventurers of the Vietnam era. (“American Idiot” could be called “Hair” with a buzz cut, a nose ring and a bad attitude.)
Mournful as it is about the prospects of 21st-century Americans, the show possesses a stimulating energy and a vision of wasted youth that holds us in its grip. And to ring a variation on the Woody Allen joke about sex being dirty if you’re doing it right, the only thing sadder than wasting your youth is not wasting it.
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