American Idiot makes it easy to make a pun about the type of person who would like this show
“This is my rage,” said one of the many disaffected youth near the end of American Idiot, the bloated musical not just of the same name as an album by Green Day, but actually formed with the help of Green Day and named after the aforementioned 2004 mega-record. The show’s 90-minute run inspires a similar feeling about the musical: “This is my rage.” In many ways, the production is a glorified rock concert, but with jazz hands and High School Musical-style theatrics. At one point, a woman dressed in a full burqa flies onto the stage—well, not literally, there’s no magic in this production, none at all—but she is suspended by wire. It’s totally unnecessary and borderline offensive as she disrobes to reveal a white babe dressed like Aladdin’s Jasmine. Why is there flying, anyway? And for that matter, why is everyone in their underwear so often? Also, what the hell is going on in this plot? Where are the connective pieces that make the audience understand how X affects Y, and transforms Y, which in turn transforms X. Also, who are these characters? Does it matter? No! Let the overwrought rock show continue! This is totally punk, or something.
The premise of the musical itself is an impossible staircase of contradictions and challenges. Let’s take a punk-rock band—one that assails the evils of The Man—and let’s take its already overtly commercial music, and wrap it all in the context of a musical with a plot on the slight side, to say the least. And then we’ll use this system, and the hegemony of our brand, to sell tickets to members of the rebellious white-collar sect who perhaps relate to the “fuck the man” rhetoric while also simultaneously benefitting from it. It may not be prudent to pick fights with why or how the production came into being, in favor of focusing on what makes it such a wretched thing in practice—but the two seem inextricably connected, and the irony of the production is an overwhelming distraction.
On the bright side, the performers aren’t terrible or anything, and the show, which got its start on Broadway, will play through this Sunday at the Orpheum. Some members of the huge cast actually have great voices, and if you like Green Day—shudder—and that sort of disaffected, California-born, nasally yowl embedded into rock songs, man, then you may even be like the man visible from our seat, jamming along on his air guitar as his girlfriend rested her weary head on his shoulder. Why so weary, young girlfriend? Was the way everyone came out onstage in their underwear for seemingly no reason other than to show off their buxom curves making you sleepy? Or were you simply overtired after witnessing 10-plus men in light, hugging boxer briefs wowing the audience with their toned legs and butts? Or maybe it was how the entirety of the thing was so damn gimmicky. The premise itself—let’s make a musical out of Green Day, and risk nothing!—is a gimmick. To hope for a production that’s anything more than flash and bang is to find yourself sorely disappointed. And there are many flashes of light and sound, probably to numb the audience from the nonsensical, melodramatic action on the stage. It’s true: The actors are playing the type of dispirited California dreamers characterized by hysterics—but in the case of this musical, the actors are never anything but vessels for song, dance, and attitude. This is my rage.
