Photo: Broadway.tv
Directed by Michael Mayer

Written by Billie Joe Armstrong

Starring John Gallagher Jr., Stark Sands, Michael Esper, Rebecca Naomi Jones, Christina Sajous, Mary Faber and Tony Vincent

The youthful cast of Broadway’s rendition of punk rock band Green Day’s seventh studio album adds a refreshing take on an unconventional Broadway show.

The exceptional opening set-piece to American Idiot on Broadway, in which the entire cast climbs, collapses and then casually rides building scaffolding like a double-decker bus while grooving and moshing to the tenor of their bass-heavy angst, is emblematic of the entire experience: a controlled crash of sounds and visuals with little in the way of story or logical happening but with an ample (and perhaps compensatory) amount of youthful energy that alone is worth multiple viewings of the performance. Driven almost completely by its competent young stars, John Gallagher Jr. as jaded twenty-something Johnny, Stark Sands as military-man Tunny, and Michael Esper as Will the immature young father, and a host of equally important others, the show rarely skidders into territory that isn’t bombastic rock opera and loud-thrash-punk-danceness-thing. This is what it is all about, really.

The relative youth of the characters – and the narrow range of issues that stemmer from these ne’er-do-wells – provides for an uncontrolled tantrum of movement, sound and surprisingly, humorous backbeat-less dialogue that contrasts gladly with the quick but rigid narrative constructed for this adaption. The aforementioned issues are familiar to any bored and emotionally surfeited teenager: restlessness in the face of sameness, disquiet over inaction defaulting to reckless patriotism, and the inability to shed one’s youth in the wake of unexpected fatherhood. That youth is dying – much too quickly, at that, considering the manifold options exhibited; drugs, war, unborn babies and their young gravid mothers – is overwhelmingly dramatized through the music and energetic altitude of the show’s cast. Everyone is jumping and singing and falling and singing. When they are not jumping and just sitting or standing silhouetted, it is melancholic and contemplative. It is almost pulp.

“Anything more than what is given would only stutter the tunes and leave the audience with nothing to hum on the way home.”

But this is all dandy. So what if the characterizations are archetypal and lack Dostoyevskian refinement? So what if there is seven minutes of dialogue in a ninety minute show? Anything more than what is given would only stutter the tunes and leave the audience with nothing to hum on the way home. The exposition and background are familiar, internalized years ago when we identified with these characters more closely, when we probably would have taken a hit with them. That we are distant now is unimportant because of the huge buzz the music supplies.

The showrunners and actors have taken Green Day’s lyrics to heart and imbued the show with a soul that is absent from bracketed stage directions; the energy and execution of the music and movement gives the show a modern and improvisational quality to the performances.

Rebecca Naomi Jones as Whatsername is vibrant, exotic and tremendous, directly channeling the allure of the sought-after future. When Johnny notices her for the first time in the window, the audience is just as rapt for this window-gazer to fall out of the window, just to have her closer. Thankfully, Johnny just parkours over to her via some industrial contrivance, ladder-thing. Tony Vincent as St. Jimmy is mesmerizing in his Marilyn Mansonesque portrayal of Johnny’s addled alter ego / drug pusher. Slithering and ignoring Johnny’s personal space with such skill, you would think Vincent spent some time as an embodied metaphor for the negative social zeitgeist before his master turn as thespian. The character of Will develops least, but the point of leveraging multiple character stories is at best of mild contention; Johnny is clearly the star as a callow composite of puerile caprice and gloom, and John Gallagher Jr. carries that torch (along with his seemingly congenital rage and love) more than competently. Despite this, Esper’s single headliner contribution to the show and studio album of the show, “Give Me Novocaine”, is excellent and only rues that Billie Joe did not write more songs about teen pregnancy. Stark Sands returns to his “Generation Kill” roots as soldier boy with a song in his heart and a fairy-tale in his head, doing his audience proud. I can already feel the disillusionment settling in. Thank you sir, may I have another?

As to criticisms over the narrative, especially its circular ending where the boys return home seemingly no better than when they departed; it is the kind of recidivism one can be proud of. The boys come home broken but more learned and Will reunites with his mates as well as, at least partially, his estranged wife and child. Johnny’s teenage whimsy is still evident, as he quasi-maturely resigns to losing the “love of his life”, despite still being, like, twenty-three and the audience bearing at best the most libidinal aspects of the seemingly protracted relationship. All the same, the boys’ lives gain some traction, and that is all you can hope for with young people these days; we traffic in half-measures and alternating bursts of anomy and mania.

The show succeeds as a companion piece to the album, not necessarily informing its salient images (grenade hearts, soda pop and everything not soda pop, a sensational new dance move called “The Propaganda”, etc.) but also ameliorating our objective opinions of the album, an arguably great musical work, into an apropos and subjective emotional rawness. Effectively, it jets us to the loudness of our lost youth, which is spectacular.

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