A very ‘American’ musical experience
Actors in the touring Green Day production have been surprised by reactions.
Joshua Kobak, hair already spiked like the character of St. Jimmy, is pondering the question of what “American Idiot” is giving to America, and what America is giving back to “American Idiot” now that the Green Day musical is out on the road.
Kobak, who plays a sexually ambivalent drug pusher in the touring production of the show, has dark eyes, a fixed stare, close-to-the-surface emotions and a certain weariness, as if he’s figuring out if his questioner can be trusted. That seems apt for “American Idiot,” a show about both the futility and the necessity of individual hope and longing in Green Day’s operatic conception of vaguely disenchfranchised twentysomethings all lost in a paranoid 2004 America.
Sitting over a pre-matinee brunch in a restaurant in Chicago’s theater district, actors Van Hughes and Leslie Mcdonel (like Kobak, both are holdovers from the Broadway company of this 2010 musical), have already expressed excitement about bringing the evocative Green Day lyrics down the proverbial lost highways, into suburbia, across the alien nation to the Los Angeles stand of “American Idiot,” which begins March 13 at the Ahmanson Theatre.
“There is something about shows with ‘America’ in their name,” Hughes had said, grinning. He plays the central character of Johnny, an alienated but needy sensualist who gets hooked on sex and St. Jimmy’s drugs. “There’s something really powerful about that. It’s like we’re an invasion of their hometown.”
But Kobak comes up with something different.
“I’ve been surprised,” he says, tentatively. “The feeling that comes back to me is grief. For addiction. For people who have lost someone or for the someone who was lost. Somehow, the show brings that out.”
Hughes and Mcdonel (who plays Heather, a young woman who finds herself pregnant) stare and then nod. To perform a show based on a 2004 Green Day album, a show with songs that range from punk numbers dominated by thrashing guitar down strokes to plaintive ballads where sweet melody prevails, is to be aware of the powers of contrast and contradiction.
“There is something,” Hughes says, “about dropping down in a new city every week and hanging your dark cloud over a dirty town.”
He starts talking about Detroit, the only place, he said, where the whole audience stood for the encore.
“We had just gotten out of Canada,” Hughes said. “In Toronto, it felt like we were yelling at Canadians about America. They got it, they liked it, they agreed with it, but there was a disconnect. Not in Detroit. If there are any people in America that understand disenchantment, it is the people of Detroit. In Detroit, they weren’t clapping. They were shouting.”
Green Day, of course, has fans in Michigan and all over the country who provide “American Idiot” with a built-in national following and who made a touring production viable, even though audiences for touring Broadway shows tend to be dominated by subscribers rather than the single-ticket buyers of Broadway. Presenters, then, are gambling not only that Green Day fans will fill in the single-ticket sales but make up for those subscribers, especially older subscribers, who might be turned off by loud punk rock. In Chicago, several such subscribers could be seen headed for an early exit on opening night, although Mcdonel says that she has been surprised by “how accepting some people have been, even those for whom this is clearly outside their comfort zone.”
Green Day emerged in the late 1980s as part of the volumous Berkeley punk scene. “American Idiot” was first staged at the in Los Angeles, in the audience at least.
Armstrong’s presence aside, this first leg of the national tour of “American Idiot” is, as national tours go these days, a pretty close replication of the Broadway experience.
On Broadway, the physical production was dominated by a huge wall, designed by Christine Jones and peppered with video screens. The touring set is much less tall (20 feet as opposed to 45) but not necessarily to the detriment of the show. “Everything is in a more horizontal environment now,” Mayer said. “It puts more focus on the people.”
And, says orchestrator Tom Kitt, on the music. Kitt argues that the questions that accompanied the tour — Was this music too harsh for mainstream theatergoers? — were the same questions that were asked when the show was courting Broadway investors.
“I always felt like the power of this music could reach people who had never heard Green Day before,” Kitt said by telephone. “Billie Joe and the band are melodists. They are rooted in punk, and there is music that celebrates the down stroke guitar motion, but they write incredibly strong, melodic music, where there are arpeggios; where there is piano.”
For the show, Kitt added new layers of orchestration, making extensive use of the cello, for example. Saying he has been influenced by Beatles producer George Martin, Kitt also argued that this experience has shown that Green Day’s music works well with fuller and more acoustic orchestrations, with the apparent disconnect only adding to the complexity of the musical drama.
Meanwhile, Kovak, Hughes and Mcdonel are selling Green Day every night, from State College, Pa., to St. Louis. Kovak is a refugee from the original cast of “SpiderMan: Turn Off the Dark,” an experience he declined to discuss but that clearly left him bruised. “With this ‘American Idiot,’ we are all just going 160 on a motorcycle ride across the country,” he said, changing the subject. “Nothing I’d rather do in life.”
On this day, a load-out awaited, followed by a flight north. “Minneapolis,” Mcdonel said confidently, “is where Billie Joe met his wife.”
cjones5@tribune.com