REVIEW: AMERICAN IDIOT ON BROADWAY

I haven't seen very many Broadway shows since I caught The Who's Tommy nearly two decades ago. I remember thinking that the Broadway renditions of the songs were goofy. Worse, they even changed the storyline to have a more optimistic ending. I'm not a big showtunes guy, and I prefer rock and roll.  But I remember thinking that maybe Broadway isn't really the right venue for rock and roll.  And while Jersey Boys, about The Four Seasons, has done quite well and is supposedly quite good, most rock and roll-based stage productions have tanked.

Green Day's American Idiot is the first time that a Broadway production has been based on recent music: American Idiot came out in 2004. I was wondering how different this would be than Tommy, or the other revue-ish rock-based musicals. Pretty different, actually. You walk in, and they provide magic markers to write on the walls of the lobby.  You gotta love that. The band actually played on the stage, not from a pit. And it was rocking. Musically, the songs stuck pretty much to the original arrangements, the vocal arrangements were of course very different and very Broadway. (A good preview is the "21 Guns" single by Green Day with the cast). If you can't get past that, you wouldn't like it. The same goes for the plot - it didn't go too far, and the characters weren't super developed, but you can get stuck on that point.  Or, as Larry Flick would say, you can have a twinkie and go for the ride. I decided to go for the ride.  I had a great time. The American Idiot songs were fun, and there was even an awesome b-side ("Favorite Son") as well as two tracks from 21st Century Breakdown ("21 Guns" and "Know Your Enemy"). The story wasn't how I pictured it when I listened to the album (I thought of it as a future totalitarian government vs. punk rockers) but I didn't write the play.  I didn't get hung up on anything though, and I had a good time, which is probably the right way to approach something like this.

I took my young 13 year old cousin Kyle, and his review was much more succinct than mine. "Best. Play. Ever." I'm looking forward to taking him to see Green Day in concert this summer, which I think I will prefer. Still, I'll give props to the cast and crew of American Idiot, they brought rock and roll in a semi-legit way to the Broadway stage which is no easy feat.