Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Green Day screamed an angry scream almost a decade ago, and the power-pop opera "American Idiot" burst forth, giving voice to like-minded antiestablishment rebels. The band's songwriter and frontman, Billie Joe Armstrong, had emerged from the punk scene with rage and angst and a multiplatinum hit, followed up in 2009 by "21st Century Breakdown." It was around that time that destiny took an odd turn -- toward the East Coast. He began hobnobbing with another rebel, Michael Mayer, the director of Tony-winning "Spring Awakening," a musical that threw tradition out the stage door and attracted young audiences to the theater.
2 comments:
I am a huge Green Day fan, so I went to see this last weekend. The cast had a great energy, and seeing them sing these songs that 12 year old me rocked out to was a pretty great experience. As the article mentioned, the set and lighting were both very impressive and fit the show very well; there was a multitude of TV screens affixed on the walls of a hangar-looking stage screening images of 20th and 21st century America. The costumes embodied perfectly Green Day's genre and style, but I can't say I really enjoyed the choreography.
There is something to be said here about musicals based on previously written songs. The album "American Idiot" already has a story line of its own, and the musical drew on that to create its plot; however, it also added divergent plots that took attention away from the main, original story. In the end, the musical's story line was somewhat disconnected at time, and the ties between story elements were pretty weak. Green Day's message about disconnection from dysfunctional mainstream society is very strong, and I felt that it only partly came across in the musical.
Despite some weak elements, overall it was a really enjoyable show and a wonderful tribute to Green Day's music and message.
While I was a bigger fan of the show than it seems Camille was, the emphasis was a bit more on the "Idiot" over the "American" in this production. Tunny's story is most heavily American - entranced by the military and put through the worst of casualties but still coming home with love (and a prosthetic leg), his story emphasized both the fever of a war society (and the utter rejection of it by others). Johnny's plot of drug abuse felt like the weakest of the three stories, and yet Whatshername's response in "Letterbomb" finally felt justified through Nee's portrayal of a Johnny who knew he was screwing up, but didn't know how to help himself.
Having seen the Broadway production before coming to this non-Equity tour production, I was interested to see the differences between the sets, which impacted the other design elements. The set has been chopped in half and painted gray rather than stark white - by providing a backdrop with less contrast for projections and thus more emphasis is placed on lighting to brighten the space. In general, though, the grunge comes through here more than the original production - we're less aircraft hangar here and more warehouse/loading dock, so this production feels more intimate than the big imposing set of the original.
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