I have little doubt that “American Idiot,” Green Day’s hit 2004 album turned into a 90-minute punk rock musical, will wind up on Broadway. There is a saying in the theater that all that it takes to mount a show on Broadway is an American idiot with money.

Ok, maybe that isn’t a saying in the theater, but it should be.

The point is not that the producers who are taking on “American Idiot” (including Tom Hulce, the one-time movie star idol of “Amadeus” and “Animal House”), are going to lose money, given any Broadway theater’s relative small number of seats and Green Day’s huge number of fans. Some 12 million people bought the album.

“American Idiot” the musical has been playing at the Berkeley Repertory Theater to standing ovations since September 4th, and has extended its run until November 15th. There has been much talk that a move to Broadway is both inevitable and desirable.

January 5th, 2010 update: Green Day’s American Idiot announces its Broadway run: previews start March 24 at the St. James, opens April 20.

I just saw it and I am not saying it is awful. It has awesome energy, with a talented and attractive young cast, accompanied by an eight-piece band, some of whose members play right there on the stage among the actors.

There are many striking visual moments, helped along by a set (think: industrial/commercial wasteland) that is itself so bursting with activity – the back wall features some two dozen video monitors (which sometimes show the performers in close-up and sometimes offer a TV test pattern with words that change from “Please Stand By” to “Please Please Me” to “Please Fuck Off”), graffiti, trash, posters of Marilyn Monroe, old newspapers, little balconies set high up where performers occasionally rock under spotlights — that it is likely some theatergoers miss the full-sized automobile and overloaded shopping cart both hanging upside down in mid-air.

If Green Day supplies the music and Green Day vocalist and guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong the lyrics, an impressive group of Broadway veterans is responsible for almost everything else. The Berkeley Rep production of “American Idiot” features much of the same talent that put together “Spring Awakening,” the Broadway musical that won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical: Director Michael Mayer, star John Gallagher Jr., set designer Christine Jones, lighting designer Kevin Adams, sound designer Brian Ronan. And “Spring Awakening” was far from the Broadway debut for most of this talent: The director has almost a dozen Broadway credits, the sound designer almost two dozen. If that weren’t enough, the production’s musical supervisor, responsible for its orchestrations and musical arrangements, is Tom Kitt, the Tony-winning composer of “Next to Normal.” Even Billie Joe Armstrong, the most recognizable of Green Day’s three band members, recently revealed that, before he turned punk, he he liked singing show tunes from musicals like “Gypsy” and “Bye, Bye Birdie”

But “American Idiot,” at least in its current version, is no
“Spring Awakening.” True they share a theme of alienated youth, but “Spring Awakening” was based on a nineteenth century German play and has a clear-cut plot. The book of “American Idiot” is credited to Billie Joe Armstrong and Michael Mayer, but, try as I could, I could not really discern a book.

To the extent that I could figure it out, the story of “American Idiot” focuses on three friends, Johnny, Will and Tunny, who live an alienated existence in the suburbs.

Johnny sings:

I’m the son of rage and love
The Jesus of Suburbia
From the Bible of none of the above
On a steady diet of soda pop and Ritalin.

Will gets his girlfriend pregnant. Tunny enlists in the army. Johnny moves to the city, shoots drugs, starts going out with a girl cleverly named Whatsername.

Watching “American Idiot” did not remind me of “Spring Awakening” or “Rent” or even “Hair,” whose own lack of a strong overall narrative never bothered me, maybe because each song told its own clear story. The songs in “American Idiot” (several of which are from Green Day’s new album, “21st Century Breakdown”) are more like aural abstract paintings. If the current show evoked any memories of past Broadway musicals for me, it was Paul Simon’s “The Capeman” which also had a prestigious array of talents behind it. There were appealing songs, there was an ostensible plot based on true events (a Puerto Rican imprisoned for murder returns to the neighborhood), but ultimately there was little sense that the creators knew how to tell a story on the stage, and the result was confusing, oddly paced, dramatically inert — a less than satisfying theatrical experience.

“American Idiot” is not “The Capeman” and in any case there is an opportunity to bring in a dramaturge before it moves to Broadway. It has far more visually arresting moments: Johnny injects his girlfriend with heroin while they’re making love on a couch under a pool of light; a row of soldiers lie in hospital beds as their intravenous drip apparatus drop from the skies; a woman covered in sky-blue burkha descends from the sky (there is a lot of descending from the skies), disrobes to reveal a red harem-like outfit, then clasps a soldier in his hospital bed and brings him into the air with her; Johnny takes off his shirt, takes a stick of lipstick and draws the Ankh symbol of life on his chest (there is a lot of taking off and putting on of shirts). But all in all, “American Idiot” worked best for me when I thought of it not as a Broadway-bound musical at all, but as a literally spectacular rock concert, a three-ring circus of a rock concert, maybe the most theatrical rock concert ever produced.

Photographs courtesy of Berkeley Rep

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