AMERICAN IDIOT STUMBLES ON ITS OWN POP-PUNK AMBITION
Since Hair brought hippie culture to Broadway, rock musicals have been trying with varying degrees of success to capture the essence of a generation. With its songbook drawn primarily from the band’s 2004 album of the same name, American Idiot represents Green Day’s attempt to do the same with pop punk. The results are moderately successful.
The story centres on a trio of young men — Johnny, Tunny and Will. Bored by their suburban existence, they pick up their guitars and try to escape to the city. But of course, life offers up the usual temptations and distractions — girls, unexpected responsibilities, drugs — and the three are separated.
With a libretto by Green Day frontman Billy Joe Armstrong and Tony Award-winning director Michael Mayer, American Idiot suffers from some of the same shortcomings as the pop punk songs that comprise the soundtrack — an overload of semi-poetic clichés that dissolve when you pay more attention to them than the average fourminute radio appearance.
The central trio are supposed to be contemporary working class everymen, but their journeys seem to float in time and geography. When Johnny and Tunny move to the city, it’s just called The City. Their feelings of unrest are a response, not to anything specific, but to a general malaise — a sentiment that might have had more of a place in the 1990s than today.
If the male characters feel thin, the female characters are practically nonexistent. Elaine Bevans does her best to imbue Johnny’s
love interest with personality, but it’s hard to do much with a character named Whatsername. It’s hard to care about the emotional journey of characters that feel like rough sketches rather than people.
But maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s a statement about the flatness of modern existence. If you can forgive the generalities, the action clips along at a fairly fast pace and Green Day’s songs offer a few infectious hooks that could make the whole thing worth it. So why doesn’t this production work?
A lot of that comes down to Ryan Mooney’s direction. With a cast this large and a massive set of scaffolding taking up half the stage, transitions between songs and set pieces must be spot on for the audience to follow the visual metaphors or even know where to direct their attention. But on opening night, the transitions were muddy when they should have been tight.
A few key scenes centre on characters being inspired by things they see on television, for instance, but the visual cues to let you know this get lost. The lighting design is unreliable, and on opening night, microphones kept cutting out, making it difficult to know who was singing under the amped up instruments.
One of the most confus- ing devices has to do with the appearance of Johnny’s punk rock alter ego, Saint Jimmy, a character sometimes played by Armstrong himself in the original production.
Although Myles MJ McCarthy’s physical performance and vocal acrobatics are easily the high point of the show, his entrance is poorly orchestrated. It takes a while to figure out who he is and why he keeps appearing, and his disappearance is almost farcically anticlimactic.
In the end, despite its catchy score and enthusiastic young cast, the Canadian premiere from Fighting Chance Productions trips up on its own ambition.