American Idiot Broadway Reviews

The new Broadway musical 'American Idiot' starts off at a fever pitch -- and stays there. By the time it ends, 90 minutes later, you may feel more numbed than stirred. Based on Green Day's 2004 concept album of the same name, the show, which opened last night, delivers an impressive amount of terrific numbers. Many have a genuine melodic pull underneath their brash power, and they are imaginatively, punchily staged by director Michael Mayer ('Spring Awakening') and choreographer Steven Hoggett ('Black Watch'). If only we could take a breather once in a while.

While our century began with inane 'jukebox musicals' that crowbarred pre-existing songs that were not written for the stage into makeshift plots (a refresher course in the genre is still being offered at The Winter Garden) American Idiot (along with the still-running Jersey Boys) shows it is possible to intelligently use such material to create a dramatically intriguing theatre piece. American Idiot may not offer an uplifting story, or even especially sympathetic characters, but most likely anyone who has gone through a youthful rebellion can see a bit of their determined, frightened, naïve and somewhat stupid selves on stage at the St. James Theatre.

I suspect that I may grow to appreciate 'American Idiot' over time, which is essentially what happened to me with 'Passing Strange.' At first, I was thrown off by the lack of coherent storytelling in 'Passing Strange.' But after listening to the album several times and then watching the filmed performance on DVD, I became able to appreciate the musical on its own terms. I even listened to the original album today on my IPOD. It's also worth pointing out that the Green Day fanbase, by already knowing the lyrics by heart, will be better able to follow the 'Jesus of Suburbia' plotline in spite of its sketchiness and fill in (or ignore entirely) all the gaps. Nevertheless, I need to be true to my gut instincts; and for the time being, will proudly air my initial grievances over the lack of character and story development in 'American Idiot.'

All this being the case, 'American Idiot' rises or falls almost entirely on the strength of the songs themselves, and I regret to say that I found them to be brain-numbingly dull. Perhaps I might have felt differently if I were 14, but I was all but incapable of attending to the puerile maunderings of Billie Joe Armstrong, Green Day's lyricist, of which the following specimens are representative: • 'Well maybe I am the faggot America / I'm not a part of a redneck agenda.' • 'Lost children with dirty faces today / No one really seems to care.' • 'Summer has come and passed / The innocent can never last.' As for the music, it reminded me of an amphetamine-crazed hamster running on a treadmill.

It’s a self-described “rock opera” set in a self-created “Recent Past,” and it purports to evoke, with a single tear and a power chord, the confusing days of the terror-stricken early 21st century, when we yo-yoed from cowed powerlessness to inchoate fury. Well, confusing and inchoate this show most definitely is: Its version of youthful anomie is so far off the mark, and such a muddled conflation of vague Gen-X nostalgia and generic rebellion sample tracks, that the effect is almost comical. But mostly just irritating.

With scorching arrangements by Tom Kitt (who just won a Pulitzer for his “Next to Normal” score), the songs sneer and whine just as a rock-n-roll concert ought to. Still, 90 minutes of barbaric yawp does not an opera, punk or otherwise, make.

Thanks for the music, Green Day. But, jeez, could you have spared a story? And a couple characters who aren't clichéd stick figures? Because that's what a Broadway musical needs to make it more than just a music video or a concert. Unfortunately, 'American Idiot' at the St. James comes up short on those essential counts.

We never learn enough about this trio to care for them as individuals. And Green Day's songs, though sometimes effective in striking general attitudes, don't do much to make these guys seem contemporary quintessences, either. Only one song, the mournful 'When September Ends,' lingers in the mind. Mayer's design team blankets this thin slice of life in cascades of projections, always apt but predictable. His astute casting pays off: His three leads, who've all proven their skill in nonmusicals, give these straw figures solid presences. An elaborately choreographed flying effect, when Sands hallucinates in his hospital bed, ranks with the most inventive such stunts I've ever seen. I didn't come away cursing, or bored, or feeling that I'd wasted my time. But I also didn't feel satisfied. And I couldn't help savoring the irony of artists who critique the system by, literally, plugging into it. It's the influence of mass media, rock included, that keeps such non-hero types from becoming themselves. If only they'd joined a community theater group instead.

Dramaturgy aside, 'American Idiot' comes dressed in an exciting and impressive production. Mayer's set designer, Christine Jones, has contrived a monumental space flanked by towering postered walls incorporating 43 busily working video monitors. There is also a metal staircase to the stars, or the flies of the St. James, which is only half used by the director; the two upper landings are reserved for the violinist and the violist, who must get pretty lonely up there. Mayer and Jones have been joined by video designer Darrel Maloney and lighting designer Kevin Adams to create what might be termed a 'really big show.'

American Idiot—the rock opera version of Green Day’s 2004 pop-punk album, which opened at the St. James Theatre yesterday—is an energetic and entertaining 95 minutes. It’s fun. But it’s also, amid all the booming rock, a little dull. You’re diverted, but you’re not moved. There are archetypes and themes, but there aren’t really characters or a plot. American Idiot is a concert; it’s not a play.

And thus “American Idiot,” the show, delivers a thick, gorgeous head rush of a musical soundscape without current Broadway parallel. It turns out to offer the kind of sensual lushness that a lot more traditional musicals would kill to emulate. That's mostly due to the brilliance of Tom Kitt's orchestrations, adding violin, cello, weight and gravitas to the Green Day sound without blunting its aggressive edge. With the gifted director Michael Mayer spreading his eight-member band out across a beautifully cacophonous setting — more a video-filled installation, really — from Christine Jones that evokes a constant blaring of Fox News in an endless sea of 7-Eleven parking lots and crappy urban apartments, you get a stunning musical wash of all corners of human emotion.

The musical, which opened Tuesday at the St. James Theatre, is short, some 95 minutes. Just right for an MTV generation weaned on YouTube clips and music videos. 'American Idiot,' in fact, plays like one. Wildly diverting to look it, the show has the barest wisp of a story and minimal character development. At best, its slacker guys are sketchy portraits, prototypes rather than real people.

Although the original concept album is reasonably cohesive, it's a thin premise on which to base a musical, and the show's book, by the band's Billie Joe Armstrong and director Michael Mayer, doesn't manage to flesh it out sufficiently. Telling its story largely through music and movement with only a smattering of dialogue, 'Idiot' never manages to make us care about the fate of its thinly drawn characters. Still, there's a lot of passion onstage, and Mayer has provided the sort of propulsive staging that helps put the material over.

If 'Spring Awakening' was the birth of genuine rock musicals on Broadway, then 'American Idiot' is its worthy son. Not as groundbreaking or original as its precocious papa in 2006, the punk-pop opera based on Green Day's multiplatinum album is an exuberant assault - a slick and tough 95-minute package of alienated suburban youth, media overstimulation and seamless, high-concept theatricality.

Director Michael Mayer has dressed the story and score up with a relentless staging that owes its inspiration to many sources, from the musicals Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair, and Rent to Twyla Tharp's Movin' Out and Des McAnuff's Tommy. Steven Hoggett's choreography feels mostly indebted to Michael Jackson music videos, as indeed does the entire short-attention-span ambience of the entire piece. I was hoping to experience something new in this new-generation rock opera, but American Idiot is instead a long string of cliches. There's diverting stuff to watch, and the music is almost always pretty good, but it's ultimately derivative, boring theatre.

The book fails to develop these characters beyond their initial conflicts, and it wouldn't hurt to have more than a few diary entries from Johnny to guide us. Nevertheless, the dynamic score—the jagged lyrics are by Armstrong, who also composed the driving music, with Mike Dirnt and Trè Cool—leads us into the frazzled psyches of an aimless portion of America's Generation Y. Tom Kitt, credited with musical supervision, arrangements, and orchestrations, builds a bridge between the worlds of rock and Broadway by making the songs accessible to general audiences without losing the chest-slamming intensity.

Rage courses through the Green Day-scored American Idiot and fittingly, this andrenalized gut-punch of a musical is bound to piss you off. Whether you’re a Broadway nostalgist longing for middle-of-the-road kitsch, or a sullen teen who vicariously thrills to the show’s grimacing, bird-flipping punks, your heart will pound, your pupils will dilate, you will sweat and breathe hard. Such a state is intense but not permanent: Anger is just a drug, after all. But for the 90 minutes that American Idiot has you in its white-knuckle grasp, it will electrify and overwhelm your senses. Here’s a musical to thrash to. Goodbye, orchestra pit; hello, mosh pit.

Few could have predicted that American Idiot, the new adaptation of the band's massively popular, starkly disenchanted album of the same name, would be the feel-good musical of the season. But in the hands of director Michael Mayer, who also co-wrote the libretto with Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, Idiot has become just that — as well as a case study in the power of teamwork in musical theater.

There’s a prismatic effect to this show. Some will see 'American Idiot' as an elaborate music video for the big stage while others will find it revelatory. As a mother of a 16-year-old, I found it to be a powerful cautionary tale. As a critic, I felt I’d seen it all before and as someone who appreciates superior talent in any form, it’s quite awesome.

“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.