"This was the highest moment I think we've ever had as a band in the 21 years we've been around," Billie Joe Armstrong said of the opening night of American Idiot, the musical based on Green Day's album of the same name. And high he should be, and no, we aren't just saying that because the musical opened on 4/20, but because it's gotten raves from the likes of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times . Who'd have thought that Broadway was ready for punk? Flip through our gallery to see Green Day arriving to rock opera's big opening night, as well as joining the cast of American Idiot for their curtain call. Excuse us, we have to find someone to promise our first born child to in exchange for first row, center tickets.
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Rage and love, those consuming emotions felt with a particularly acute pang in youth, all but burn up the stage in “American Idiot,” the thrillingly raucous and gorgeously wrought Broadway musical adapted from the blockbuster pop-punk album by Green Day.
Pop on Broadway, sure. But punk? Yes, indeed, and served straight up, with each sneering lyric and snarling riff in place. A stately old pile steps from the tourist-clogged Times Square might seem a strange place for the music of Green Day, and for theater this blunt, bold and aggressive in its attitude. Not to mention loud. But from the moment the curtain rises on a panorama of baleful youngsters at the venerable St. James Theater, where the show opened on Tuesday night, it’s clear that these kids are going to make themselves at home, even if it means tearing up the place in the process.
Which they do, figuratively speaking. “American Idiot,” directed by Michael Mayer and performed with galvanizing intensity by a terrific cast, detonates a fierce aesthetic charge in this ho-hum Broadway season. A pulsating portrait of wasted youth that invokes all the standard genre conventions — bring on the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, please!
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Rosie O'Donnell and Donald Trump wound up under the same roof on opening night - without incident. Also: Whoopi Goldberg, Paul Rudd, Tony Kushner and Mark Harris, Edie Falco, T. R. Knight, Michael Urie, Jerry Dixon and Mario Cantone, Zachary Quinto, Camryn Manheim, Tamara Tunie, John Cameron Mitchell, Steven Pasquale, Steve Van Zandt, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ana Gasteyer, Marian Seldes and Elizabeth Gilles.
Meet the first-nighters at the opening of Broadway's American Idiot, the new Green Day musical.
'Tis the season for another Spring Awakening from director Michael Mayer, so - fast-forwarding 120 years from that earlier late-1800s-set show - gangway for American Idiot, which laid siege April 20 to the St. James with huddled masses of alienated, disenfranchised youth writhing and Ritalin-ing with suburban anomie. From the look of the spectacular chaos that he has spilled across the stage, Mayer may be not entirely awake but just having a huge hallucinatory riff, brought on by overexposure to Green Day's 2004 concept album of the same name. It was his brainstorm to give the 13 songs of that cult hit (and a few more from the band's later release, "21st Century Breakdown," 2010's Grammy-winning Best Rock Album) an extended play on Broadway.
To that end, he got the band's
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The idea of a punk rock musical may strike some folks as patently absurd. How can you take one art form -- gritty, rebellious, brutally minimalist -- and marry it to another -- polished, family-friendly, harmonically complex -- without crippling them both? Some fans, in other words, are simply never going to warm to the idea of a Green Day musical, no matter how good it is.
But they're missing out. American Idiot, which opened Tuesday night at Broadway's St. James Theatre after a run at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, is about as rock'n'roll as musicals get.
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