“The musical serves as an adequate reminder of why American Idiot is worth revisiting. While the story and characters feel underwritten, the songs are performed with breathless passion.” — Dean Essner
Back in the wacky year of 2004, Green Day, Generation Y’s most popular anarchists, put out a bold punk opera called American Idiot. Brash and bombastic, the record smacked of self-importance and shameless juvenility. But despite its flaws, it was a fascinating, occasionally brilliant snapshot of post-9/ll frustration.
Given the album’s theatricality and dramatic narrative — a young burnout, likely a stand-in for singer Billie Joe Armstrong, trying to make sense of the sordid world around him — it was inevitable that it’d eventually find itself on the stage. Now that it’s here, playing at the National Theatre, it’s questionable whether the musical is good or bad for American Idiot’s legacy.
On the surface, the adaptation misses the point of much of American Idiot. The characters exist as near-parodies of the teenage nihilists who Armstrong sings about, flailing around the stage after snorting cocaine and simulating sex as if to prove, time and time again, how young and stupid they’re supposed to be.
The musical makes a concerted push to tidy things up at the end, with everyone returning “home” after their forays in the cold, real world. In fact, things finish with a full-cast rendition of “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).” The musical’s anarchic spirit is fleeting at best. If everyone is just going to end up back in the same place, both physically and mentally, after trying to flee the doldrums of life, then there must be a fibre of sanity in these characters. However, American Idiot always implied we’re messed up beyond reproach and there is no feeling “good.”
Similar to the record’s shaky, threadbare plot, the musical’s narrative is virtually nonexistent. The main storyline follows a boy who flees suburbia, moves to the city, discovers drugs, falls in love, writes some songs and then returns home, angry as ever but relatively unscathed. We don’t even learn his name. Letters written to friends back home chronicle time, but we never get a sense of the main character’s development as a person. And if American Idiot, the album, was triumphant in any way, it was in its ability to be self-reflective.
Luckily, the musical serves as an adequate reminder of why American Idiot is worth revisiting. While the story and characters feel underwritten, the songs are performed with breathless passion. Never before has “Jesus Of Suburbia” or “Are We The Waiting” sounded so full of life, a testament to the onstage performers and the preexisting source material.
Even a song like “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” which is weepy and contrived on the record, works well in a live setting, the melodrama in the lyrics and sparse acoustic guitar finding a more-than-fitting home in theater’s pompous arms.
In the end, American Idiot should fit snugly in Green Day’s history because in many ways, it works like a quintessential piece of punk rock: glib, angry, flawed but at times, life-affirming. It’s certainly not unpredictable. But maybe, just maybe, in the end, it’s right.
