American Idiot On Broadway:

Long On Talent, Short On Substance

By John Voket

My then 14-year-old son and I both fell in love with the raw energy and brash musicianship the Berkeley punk trio Green Day brought about 30 seconds into their opening number, and just a few shows into the band’s critically acclaimed American Idiot concert tour in 2007.

Just like that trek up to Lowell, Mass., to see the band live for the first time, I recently took my now 17-year-old son to check out the Broadway debut of American Idiot, a rock opera based on the music of Green Day’s now 14 million–selling project.

That’s where the love affair ended.

We both agreed, heads shaking while walking out of the St James before the encore, that everything great about American Idiot as a rock and roll album begins to unravel about 30 seconds into the Broadway adaptation of Billy Joe Armstrong’s collaboration with director Michael Mayer, who did such a bang-up job with his Tony-winning freshman effort Spring Awakening.

What made the rock album so compelling was the exceptional combination of musicianship and tight narrative – a compelling storyline that Armstrong basically lived, drawing observations from so many substance-fueled nights and aimless days full of conversations with friends and hangers-on.

What makes the musical so bad is the play’s creators unnecessarily messing with that original formula, resulting in a storyline that is hard to follow, overstuffed with incidents intended to bridge situations with flawless simplicity, which instead overcomplicate.

There’s just too much stuff going on.

In a Playbill interview between Armstrong and Mayer, the director says his suggestion to add two additional lead characters to the original tale of Johnny (a/k/a Jesus of Suburbia) on a journey to find himself was made to “open the story up.” Armstrong responds that he trusted in the decision, while agreeing that breathing life into the second and third male leads, Tunny and Will, was practically as easy as tossing out a couple more backstage passes.

According to the official synopsis, the musical premiered at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre on September 4, 2009, and became the top-grossing show in Berkeley Rep history. While even the narrative in the musical’s synopsis is pretty cohesive, the time-tripping and vast spaces the show’s creators likely felt would be filled through the audience’s intimate familiarity with the original Green Day material simply fails to gel.

The show opens just after the holidays with the 20-something buddies expressing increasing frustrations with their uneventful lives. Johnny/Jesus of Suburbia borrows money from his mom and buys bus tickets to the city for himself and his friends.

But when Will learns his girlfriend, Heather, is pregnant he decides to stay with her. So Johnny and Tunny head out.

While Johnny wanders the city fantasizing about a woman he sees in an apartment window (who turns out to be Whatsername), Tunny is seduced by a flashy television recruiting ad featuring a spectacularly costumed pack of dancing girls, and enlists in the Army.

With Tunny gone and no other friends around, Johnny meets up with a Marilyn Manson look-a-like drug dealer called “St Jimmy,” and experiences heroin for the first time with Jimmy at his side. What follows is a montage of songs underpinned by the three friends undergoing their individual exploits and battles – literally.

We see Will lose his girl and baby because he’s basically unwilling to leave the comfort of his couch and its television-fueled anesthetic. We see Johnny tightrope walking between his erupting addiction and his blooming romance with Whatsername; and we see Tunny shot and wounded along with many other fellow soldiers during a frightful campaign in the Mideast.

The eventual return home of the three friends brings the most redeeming moment of the entire show, as they reunite on an otherwise darkened stage, under three spotlights, strumming acoustic guitars and singing “Wake Me Up When September Ends.”

In the end, the story and its connectedness leaves much to be desired. But your ticket price will not be wasted if you enjoy the music – I should qualify – the most recent music of Green Day, because this cast and onstage band deliver the hardest rocking performances on Broadway this spring.

Despite a book that needs a few extra pages to provide a quality theater experience, American Idiot, like the album that spawned it, is rich with possibilities and a willing cast long on musical talent. Unfortunately, today, that does not necessarily add up to a successful Broadway musical.