Review by Tulis McCall (21 Apr 2010) There is a reason that reviewers go to see a show a few days before it opens – unlike the good old days when they came to opening night and had to produce a review within a few hours. I’m not referring to scheduling conflicts here. I’m referring to the “stick to your ribs” effect. How long does the show stay with you after you leave the theatre? That’s what I’m referring to. American Idiot didn’t make it to the curb. And it’s the oddest thing, because #1) the audience was primed for this show. We really wanted it to be a success. You could feel it in the house. #2) I was entertained by this tale of three young men, Johnny (John Gallagher, Jr.), Will (Michael Esper), and Tunny (Stark Sands) who are stuck in the wheel-in-a-cage that is their lives. But I’m entertained by people talking about their lives anyway. #3) These three men have stage presence and can tell a story. American Idiot begins with promise on a startling set by Christine Jones replete with 30 or so TV screens on which are flashed images of what passes for reality. And these kids don’t like what they are seeing. They are filled with angst and frustration and hormones. They are, in a word, normal. Johnny, Will and Tunny decide to chuck it all and blow town, but before they can Will discovers that his woman is going to have a baby. He stays behind to take care of his new family. Actually the title of this show might be The Couch on the Corner because Esper never leaves his position on the downstage couch throughout the evening. While Johnny falls in love with Whatshername (Rebecca Naomi Jones), and then falls in love with drugs – Will is on the couch singing along with it all. When Tunny joins the Army and loses his heart to The Extraordinary Girl (Christina Sajous), Will never budges. Maybe it’s the authors’ way of showing us that the man who stays home is so grounded that he ultimately pulls the others back into his orbit. Michael Mayer (director of Spring Awakening) conceived the idea for this production after hearing Green Day’s CD American Idiot. He wanted to make an expanded rock opera out of what was already a rock opera. It’s hard to tell what got expanded here, because all we ever find out about these guys is that they are struggling. Yawn. After awhile an audience needs more than that – we need a story to reach out and get us where it matters. The danger with this kind of rock is that it is an art form that depends on its followers to storm the stage. It doesn’t have to reach at all. It just has to be loud enough to override the roar of hormones in full flight. Part of the problem may also be that the music itself is already dated. American Idiot came out in 2004 when conservative talk radio was having a hoo-rah and Bush was coasting into a second term. The global condition has changed, and the generation of “instant everything” has changed with it. This music has become what it resisted. Hoisted by their own petard, as it were. Look, there really are no new stories. Aristotle pretty much took care of that. There is love, power struggles, and life/death. So the fact that there is nothing new in this production is no big deal. What is a big deal is that the nothing new is being told in a kind of bland way that is way, way, way loud, mostly unintelligible, and has only flickers of inventiveness. There are a few dazzling scenes – one where two lovers perform a sort of ballet while tied together with the rubber tubing that addicts use to tie off an artery, and another that features two other lovers in some nifty aerial moves. The set also has one glorious turn as a city in revolve. But these moments’ glow only point out the lack of same elsewhere. In his last song, Johnny sings about the gal that got away (Reminiscent of What’s Her Name by John Lee Hooker …Whatshername?, I thought I knew her, Whatshername? What happened to her? I don’t now why I’ll never forget Whatshername…. Johnny:And that was that.Or so it seemed.Is this the endOr the beginning?All I know is,She was right.I am an idiot. It’s even on my birth certificate.In so many words. This is my rageThis is my loveThis is my townThis is my cityThis is my life Yep. So it is, which means we are all back pretty much where we started with not a lot to show for it. And THEN after all the yelling and storming and struggle, the entire cast reappears, right after the curtain call, playing acoustic guitars and singing an anthem that wishes us a happy life, or evening or something. After all the angst and anger, the coda is a :-). Go figure. http://www.newyorktheatreguide.com/reviews/americanidiot10.htm Stomping Onto Broadway With a Punk Temper Tantrum By Charles Isherwood April 20, 2010 Rage and love, those consuming emotions felt with a particularly acute pang in youth, all but burn up the stage in “American Idiot,” the thrillingly raucous and gorgeously wrought Broadway musical adapted from the blockbuster poppunk album by Green Day. Pop on Broadway, sure. But punk? Yes, indeed, and served straight up, with each sneering lyric and snarling riff in place. A stately old pile steps from the tourist-clogged Times Square might seem a strange place for the music of Green Day, and for theater this blunt, bold and aggressive in its attitude. Not to mention loud. But from the moment the curtain rises on a panorama of baleful youngsters at the venerable St. James Theater, where the show opened on Tuesday night, it’s clear that these kids are going to make themselves at home, even if it means tearing up the place in the process. Which they do, figuratively speaking. “American Idiot,” directed by Michael Mayer and performed with galvanizing intensity by a terrific cast, detonates a fierce aesthetic charge in this ho-hum Broadway season. A pulsating portrait of wasted youth that invokes all the standard genre conventions — bring on the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, please! — only to transcend them through the power of its music and the artistry of its execution, the show is as invigorating and ultimately as moving as anything I’ve seen on Broadway this season. Or maybe for a few seasons past. Burning with rage and love, and knowing how and when to express them, are two different things, of course. The young men we meet in the first minutes of “American Idiot” are too callow and sullen and restless — too young, basically — to channel their emotions constructively. The show opens with a glorious 20-minute temper tantrum kicked off by the title song. “Don’t want to be an American idiot!” shouts one of the gang. The song’s signature electric guitar riff slashes through the air, echoing the testy challenge of the cry. A sharp eight-piece band, led by the conductor Carmel Dean, is arrayed around the stage, providing a sonic frame for the action. The simple but spectacular set, designed by Christine Jones, suggests an epically looming walls papered in punk posters television screens, on which frenzied flicker throughout the show. (They’re Darrel Maloney.) scaled dive club, its and pimpled by video collages the witty work of Who’s the American idiot being referred to? Well, as that curtain slowly rose, we heard the familiar voice of George W. Bush break through a haze of television chatter: “Either you are with us, or with the terrorists.” That kind of talk could bring out the heedless rebel in any kid, particularly one who is already feeling itchy at the lack of prospects in his dreary suburban burg. But while “American Idiot” is nominally a portrait of youthful malaise of a particular era — the album dates from 2004, the midpoint of the Bush years, and the show is set in “the recent past” — its depiction of the crisis of postadolescence is essentially timeless. Teenagers eager for their lives to begin, desperate to slough off their old selves and escape boredom through pure sensation, will probably always be making the same kinds of mistakes, taking the same wrong turns on the road to self-discovery. “American Idiot” is a true rock opera, almost exclusively using the music of Green Day and the lyrics of its kohleyed frontman, Billie Joe Armstrong, to tell its story. (The score comprises the whole of the title album as well as several songs from the band’s most recent release, “21st Century Breakdown.”) The book, by Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Mayer, consists only of a series of brief, snarky dispatches sent home by the central character, Johnny, played with squirmy intensity by the immensely gifted John Gallagher Jr. (“Spring Awakening,” “Rabbit Hole”). “I held up my local convenience store to get a bus ticket,” Johnny says with a smirk as he and a pal head out of town. “Actually I stole the money from my mom’s dresser.” Beat. “Actually she lent me the cash.” Such is the sheepish fate of a would-be rebel today. But at least Johnny and his buddy Tunny (Stark Sands) do manage to escape deadly suburbia for the lively city, bringing along just their guitars and the anomie and apathy that are the bread and butter of teenage attitudinizing the world over. (“I don’t care if you don’t care,” a telling lyric, could be their motto.) The friend they meant to bring along, Will (Michael Esper), was forced to stay home when he discovered that his girlfriend (Mary Faber) was pregnant. Lost and lonely, and far from ready for the responsibilities of fatherhood, he sinks into the couch, beer in one hand and bong in the other, as his friends set off for adventure. Beneath the swagger of indifference, of course, are anxiety, fear and insecurity, which Mr. Gallagher, Mr. Esper and Mr. Sands transmit with aching clarity in the show’s more reflective songs, like the hit “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” or the lilting anthem “Are We the Waiting.” The city turns out to be just a bigger version of the place Johnny and Tunny left behind, a “land of make believe that don’t believe in me.” The boys discover that while a fractious 21st-century America may not offer any easy paths to fulfillment, the deeper problem is that they don’t know how to believe in themselves. Johnny strolls the lonely streets with his guitar, vaguely yearning for love and achievement. He eventually hooks up with a girl (a vivid Rebecca Naomi Jones) but falls more powerfully under the spell of an androgynous goth drug pusher, St. Jimmy, played with mesmerizing vitality and piercing vocalism by Tony Vincent. Tunny mostly stays in bed, clicker affixed to his right hand, dangerously susceptible to a pageant of propaganda about military heroism on the tube, set to the song “Favorite Son.” By the time the song’s over, he’s enlisted and off to Iraq. In both plotting and its emotional palette, “American Idiot” is drawn in brash, primary-colored strokes, maybe too crudely for those looking for specifics of character rather than cultural archetypes. But operas — rock or classical — often trade in archetypes, and the actors flesh out their characters’ journeys through their heartfelt interpretations of the songs, with the help of Mr. Mayer’s poetic direction and the restless, convulsive choreography of Steven Hoggett (“Black Watch”), which exults in both the grace and the awkwardness of energy-generating young metabolisms. Line by line, a skeptic could fault Mr. Armstrong’s lyrics for their occasional glibness or grandiosity. That’s to be expected, too: rock music exploits heightened emotion and truisms that can fit neatly into a memorable chorus. The songs are precisely as articulate — and inarticulate — as the characters are, reflecting the moment in youth when many of us feel that pop music has more to say about us than we have to say for ourselves. (And, really, have you ever worked your way through a canonical Italian opera libretto, line by line?) In any case the music is thrilling: charged with urgency, rich in memorable melody and propulsive rhythms that sometimes evolve midsong. The orchestrations by Tom Kitt (the composer of “Next to Normal”) move from lean and mean to lush, befitting the tone of each number. Even if you are unfamiliar with Green Day’s music, you are more likely to emerge from this show humming one of the guitar riffs than you are to find a tune from “The Addams Family” tickling your memory. But the emotion charge that the show generates is as memorable as the music. “American Idiot” jolts you right back to the dizzying roller coaster of young adulthood, that turbulent time when ecstasy and misery almost seem interchangeable states, flip sides of the coin of exaltation. It captures with a piercing intensity that moment in life when everything seems possible, and nothing seems worth doing, or maybe it’s the other way around. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/theater/reviews/21idiot.html?_r=2  
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