With all the fervor surrounding the Berkeley Repertory Theatre's production of "American Idiot," it's easy to forget all the excitement that the Green Day album of the same name generated back in 2004. It was less concentrated-the production "American Idiot" set the Bay Area theater community aflame for weeks before its premiere-but nearly every teenager in the United States had some opinion of Green Day that year. For radio listeners, it was impossible to escape "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" or "Holiday," and every time the latter's opening chords rang out, it was harder not to think of President Bush and his war.
Even for a punk album, American Idiot was daring, and while many eventually revolted against its popularity, the work is a rare modern rock opera that has refused to disappear in time because the time it speaks about is not yet over. It is politically intense, confusing, hyperemotional and grandiose, and for that reason, it is still unforgettable.
Director Michael Mayer's stage adaptation of "American Idiot" is the same sort of thrill. The musical begins with politics: Recorded voices of what are presumably Fox News anchors and political talking heads slobber pro-American lines, while dozens of televisions, scattered around the walls of the stage, flash before protagonist Johnny (John Gallagher Jr.) and the cast launch into the song "American Idiot." A few songs later, Johnny's friend Tunny (Matt Caplan) enlists in the army, thanks to a persuasive military recruiter. But "American Idiot" buries politics in order to let the music dominate the production.
This decision to allow Green Day's songs to speak for themselves does emaciate the plot. Aside from a few monologues by Johnny, it is extremely barren, with songs from American Idiot and a few from this year's 21st Century Breakdown duct-taped together to create a very rough outline of a story. The three main characters-Johnny, Will and Tunny-begin the musical together, but they quickly go their separate ways. Tunny goes off to war, and not shockingly, you soon find him in a hospital; Johnny's other friend Will (Michael Esper) finds that his girl Heather (Mary Faber) has become pregnant during "Dearly Beloved," and his apathy toward the new child leads her to leave him. And Johnny himself? He follows the album's trajectory, creating a ghoulish, drug-dealing alter ego named St. Jimmy (Tony Vincent) to stimulate his pleasure sensors, which also get a good deal of action from Whatsername (Rebecca Naomi Jones).
Aside from the general, do-a-bit-of-everything cast, these characters are the driving force and emotional thrust of the play. Gallagher Jr. plays the slovenly Johnny with ease, slurring out his lines and cracking self-deprecating half-grins. His voiceless interactions with Jones stay in the realm of physical expression, which Gallagher Jr. excels at throughout the play as head bangs and thrashes his way across the stage. Esper and Caplan are slightly more peripheral, but their performances add to the dark aura. Esper's Will is so disinterested that he's almost catatonic, and Caplan's best moments come in the form of facial expressions of wide-eyed fright. But Tony Vincent's St. Jimmy truly hypnotizes. Adorned in gothic artillery and sporting tattoos on his right arm, Vincent skulks around, cackling and menacing his way about the stage. As an alter ego, he doesn't have any self-reflective monologues, but Vincent does better as the silent devil on Johnny's shoulder, slyly goading him into heroin use and taking his small performance time to deliver the line "My name is St. Jimmy, I'm a son of a gun" with a razor tone. It's nearly impossible to take your eyes off him.
All the actors give their best within a plot, which, however thin, needs to be there; while American Idiot the album didn't need any clear plot to be successful, theater is more demanding. But the story is just a formality. Rather than Green Day music set to a performance, the Berkeley Rep's "American Idiot" is a performance set to the music of Green Day. You don't hear "Wake Me Up When September Ends" because it fits the scene; you see a scene because "Wake Me Up When September Ends" is the eleventh track on American Idiot. The plot is rendered secondary here, but it hardly matters because "American Idiot" is just so excessive.
That's the greatest function of the musical: visual eye candy. Actors climb over staircases, tip over towers, play air guitar and convulse on couches. Nearly all of the musical is extreme in its physicality, which rarely fails to entertain. "American Idiot" is a music production for the Internet generation; it's short and wry, but most of all, it's passionate, fierce and uncompromising in its delivery. It's hardly nuanced-the musical doesn't take many breaths, and it feels like actors are always itching to bustle about. It's a ridiculous sight, watching grown men jump on furniture, but their intensity is strong enough that you're willing to go along with it.
Of course, not everyone will be satisfied with a makeshift story and nonstop action. When Johnny asks "Is this the end or the beginning?" near the conclusion of the piece, it's true that it is not exactly clear. Tunny comes back from war, Will's girl returns to him once more with his child and a new man, Johnny sheds his St. Jimmy skin, and nothing really has changed.
But the missing revelation is the point. "American Idiot" is certainly audacious, but it's more about desperation than it is about hope, which is appropriate for this decade and for a generation that saw the tragedy of 9/11, the birth of two wars and the current economic crisis. This is topical, glitzy theater, an immersive experience blown up to ridiculous proportions, and it's so involving that any qualms you feel will have to come after the performance. "American Idiot" might be a circle, but it manages to make going nowhere a thrill of its own
[Full article at DailyCal]
09-19 - WATCH A CLIP FROM THE NEW MUSICAL
American Idiot: Green Day talks with KTVU.com: HERE.
MOMENTS before the opening curtain of “American Idiot,” the musical theater debut of the punk band Green Day, a T-shirted house manager took the stage at Berkeley Repertory Theater for the tradition of reminding audience members to turn off their cellphones and unwrap their candies.
This being a musical by Green Day, though, it wasn’t your typical curtain speech.
“Are you ready to rock tonight?” shouted the house manager, John Gay. And sure enough, the crowd roared back, “Yeah!”
[Full article at New York Times]
09-18 - GREEN DAY GOES BROAWAY WITH MUSICAL PREMIERE
Joining a slew of other formidable rock groups who have turned their hits into narratives for the stage--Green Day threw their hat in the ring on Wednesday night with the world premiere of their musical American Idiot.
Cool and Dirnt took front and center seats for the debut, buzzing with friends and loves ones about their excitement over the Michael Mayer-directed show (of Spring Awakening fame).
Armstrong chose to stick in the wings, leading a champagne toast afterwards.
"Punk is about taking chances," Armstrong said, certainly the case for the songwriter who took his first stab at dramatic arts, writing the book for the musical.
"Green Day's American Idiot album has had a profound impact on music and culture, and this show has the potential to revolutionize modern theatre," Levi's VP of Brand Marketing Doug Sweeny told us.
09-17 - GREEN DAY'S 'AMERICAN IDIOT PUNK EXTRAVAGANZA'
All hail Jesus of Suburbia. He's a Ritalin-popping youth holding court in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven in "American Idiot." Killing time and brain cells, Johnny (aka Jesus) is an antihero for our times, a paragon of apathy in a world spiraling out of control.
Johnny's quest to find meaning amid the cacophony of post-9/11 America is the heart of the white-hot new Green Day musical "American Idiot." A collaboration between veteran Broadway director Michael Mayer and Billie Joe Armstrong, the Berkeley-bred punk trio's frontman, the amped-up punk opera is now in its explosive world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Based on the 2004 album of the same name, this genre-bending 95-minute show runs through Nov. 1. And if there's any justice in the world it will head east shortly thereafter.
On opening night Wednesday, the curtain edged up ever so slowly to reveal an industrial warehouse playground for the ADD-generation. Christine Jones' mind-blowing set is a colossal techno-beehive of video screens and graffiti that plunges us into instant sensory overload. A car hangs in midair. Strobe lights flash and blind. A band wails onstage. It's a kinetic mixed-media sculpture of a set design that telegraphs the experimental nature of the musical. We're not in Kansas anymore, people.
The director, who came to fame with the ground-breaking "Spring Awakening," slaps the traditional Broadway musical upside the head. Mayer stitches infectious hits
"Holiday," "21 Guns" and "Wake Me Up When September Ends" together with the never-recorded "When It's Time" into a post-modern coming-of-age tale. As compelling as it is abstract, the musical channels the grungy spirit of punk while also plucking at the heartstrings.
On the heels of "Passing Strange," the last alternative-rock musical Berkeley Rep sent to Broadway, this production marks the troupe's emergence as a major player in the development of hip new musicals that harness the effervescence of pop culture.
Mayer isn't afraid to push the boundaries until they bend. While "Spring Awakening" was rooted in the classical bones of Frank Wedekind's 19th-century parable, "American Idiot" has no narrative per se. There's no dialogue. It's almost entirely sung-through. It's a thrashing collage of songs fused together with hypnotic movement and eye-popping visuals. In fact, the brief narration is the only clunky part of the piece, because it doesn't stand up against the lyrics. The punk's the thing here.
Johnny (played by John Gallagher Jr.) snarls out his discontent with the world as he scrambles from the burbs to the big city. His best buds follow other paths. Will (Michael Esper) gets his girlfriend pregnant and stays at home, angry and inert. Tunny (Matt Caplan) goes off to war, lost and alone.
All of the action transpires on the same set so we slam back and forth from the battlefield to the court of the deliciously demented St. Jimmy (the formidable Tony Vincent). He's the goth-head drug dealer who seduces Johnny with the siren song of self-destruction. There's a particularly disturbing sequence as bodies writhe in the pleasure and pain of shooting up.
Gallagher Jr., who won a Tony award for his turn as the anguished Moritz in "Spring Awakening," taps into myriad shades of vulnerability as the scruffy everyman of the piece. His gift for finding the nuance amid the "whatevers" elevates Johnny's arc from one kid's adolescent apathy to an entire nation's spiritual malaise.
The only thing that makes Johnny come alive (other than the needle) is Whatsername (Rebecca Naomi Jones). The actress best remembered for "Passing Strange" gives the role a feral intensity that balances out the high-testosterone quotient of the production.
Tom Kitt's ("Next to Normal") orchestrations are like alchemy. Even radio-play standards are transformed here. In such a male milieu, it's revelatory to hear women's voices attack these songs, especially the wistful strains of "21 Guns." And "Letterbomb" becomes an anthem of pure female rage.
Throughout the piece, Steven Hoggett's ("Black Watch") visceral choreography captures the movement of wounded animals, twitching in pain or curling into a fetal crouch. The one false note may be the aerial sequence in "Extraordinary Girl," which falls a little short of the dream-like fantasia it aspires to be.
Intensely directed from start to finish, the relentless adrenaline rush of the piece makes its rare moments of quiet hit home that much harder. Indeed, the "Homecoming" number is so resonant, it feels like a finale when it's not. But these are merely quibbles in a 95-minute punk extravaganza that, as the song goes, explodes in your heart like a hand grenade.
[Read D'Souza's full review at Mercury News]
09-17 - ROLLING STONE OCTOBER 1ST - ISSUE #1088
09-17 - GREEN DAY TALK "AMERICAN IDIOT" AS MUSICAL DEBUTS
Minutes before the official opening of Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s staged rendition of American Idiot, the members of Green Day were their usual affable selves. “I had no concerns,” Billie Joe Armstrong said to sum up his feelings about adapting the band’s rock opera disc for the stage. “I was interested and flattered to meet [director] Michael Mayer. We were floored by Spring Awakening [the 2006 Tony-winning rock musical Mayer helmed], and so there were no worries. I think this is a broader version of the album. We started with Johnny, St. Jimmy, and Whatsername, and Mayer added Will, Tunny and Heather. Your heart goes out to them.”
After a standing ovation from a crowd that included the band, their friends and family, 21st Century Breakdown producer Butch Vig, and Amadeus actor Tom Hulce (one of American Idiot’s producers), the cast and audience celebrated in a sprawling party that spread out through the building, onto the patio, and into Berkeley Rep’s neighboring Thrust Theatre. A circus-like atmosphere prevailed, courtesy of new wave dance classics, Rock Band karaoke, vodka snow cones, vintage pinball, and a stylist offering free haircuts to the brave. Toward the end of the evening, she relinquished her clippers to Billie Joe Armstrong, who improvised an impressive Mohawk on a willing victim. Amidst these festivities, Armstrong’s sister and mother, Anna and Ollie Armstrong, provided emotional back story to the triumphant event.
[Read the entire review at Rolling Stone]
09-16 - GREEN DAY'S AMERICAN IDIOT MUSICAL OPENS
American Idiot, the new musical borrowing characters and songs from Green Day's hit punk-rock concept album of the same name, opens Sept. 16 after previews from Sept. 4 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California.
Tony Award-winning Spring Awakening director Michael Mayer harbored a longtime passion to see the 2004 album realized as a fleshed-out musical.
"I talked about the album and my feelings in an article in Variety," Mayer told Playbill magazine recently. "Tom Hulce, my producing partner, read the article and said it sounded amazing. He asked if I was serious. I said, 'Sure — but they'll never go for it.'"
But Green Day and its manager and agent did go for it, leading to the new musical that brings the 2004 album's Johnny, Extraordinary Girl, Whatsername and St. Jimmy to life.
[Full article at Playbill.com]
09-15 - GREEN DAY'S AMERICAN IDIOT MUSICAL AT BERKELEY REP
Berkeley Rep is staging the world premiere of American Idiot, the rock opera by the punk band Green Day. The musical is directed by Michael Mayer, and stars John Gallagher Jr, Tony Vincent, Michael Esper and Matt Caplan.
[More at Playbill.com]
09-13 - AMERICAN IDIOT MUSICAL AT LA TIMES
LA Times
By John Horn
Reporting from Berkeley--
Michael Mayer tried to contain his growing frustration. For more than nine hours at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre over two recent afternoons, Mayer's creative group was laboring to fix the glitches that were making a mess of a key sequence in the world premiere rock opera “American Idiot.” Progress was fleeting. For the two days of technical rehearsals, director Mayer and his team were stuck revising just three minutes of the show -- an elaborate fantasy dance passage in the adaptation of the pop-punk band Green Day's Grammy-winning 2004 album of the same name. At first, intravenous fluid bags flying down wires onto the four-story set listed so badly to starboard that the performers couldn't unclip them. "At some point, we've got to get this working," Mayer said a bit testily. A few moments later, a wheel on a hospital gurney snapped off, nearly launching a cast member onto the stage. Such technical problems are more or less routine for any musical featuring the kind of complicated staging Mayer is bringing to the Iraq war-themed, media-saturated "American Idiot."
Far more taxing to Mayer, whose reinventing-the-wheel "Spring Awakening" won eight 2007 Tony Awards, including best musical, was this fundamental challenge: how he would somehow conjure up an "American Idiot" story -- without adding a line of scripted dialogue between 20 Green Day songs. That wasn't the show's only hurdle. Although musical theater audiences have been willing to take up unconventional stories and diverse songwriting styles -- "Rent," "Avenue Q," "In the Heights" among recent examples -- there's a much wider chasm between the straightforward lyrics and melodies of traditional musicals like "South Pacific" and "West Side Story" and punk rock, particularly when the clashing songs are only hazily expositional. Mayer's "Spring Awakening," at least, carried Frank Wedekind's turn-of-the-century play of the same name as plot-laden source material. The Who's "Tommy," the most famous rock opera, featured delineated characters ("He's a pinball wizard") and followed a vague narrative arc about its "deaf, dumb and blind kid."
The 2004 album by the Bay Area band, on the other hand, was far heavier on emotion than exposition. Yes, "American Idiot" alluded to characters named Jesus of Suburbia, St. Jimmy, Whatsername and Extraordinary Girl, but the songs offered scarce clues as to who these people really were and what they actually did: You knew there was plenty of anger and alienation, but who, precisely, felt it, and why? More important, what actually happened to them? Even as a concept album, "American Idiot" didn't need to answer those questions. Mayer's musical certainly had to -- the show, now in previews and opening Wednesday for a run of at least six weeks with hopes of a possible move to Broadway, wasn't intended as a jukebox revue. Using just movement, projections (of still and animated images, photos, text and iconography) on 38 video screens, new song arrangements and a towering scenic backdrop, Mayer, part-time collaborator and Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong and "American Idiot's" designers had to craft and communicate a sort of wordless libretto, making sure the audience understood the story every step of the way."It's my biggest fear -- it's what keeps me up at night," Mayer said during a dinner break in a recent rehearsal. "That the story isn't clear."'
The ambitious project started with an offhand comment Mayer made around the time of the off-Broadway opening of "Spring Awakening." "It shocks me that there isn't a stage version of 'American Idiot' yet," Mayer said in a 2006 interview with Variety. "It's an opera. It's ready to go."Like his "Spring Awakening" and "American Idiot" star John Gallagher Jr., Mayer was smitten with Green Day's album. "I heard a complex story of intersecting people," he said.
The album marked a comeback for the band, which attracted a huge following with its first major label release, 1994's "Dookie." That album sold more than 10 million copies, but the band slumped with its follow-ups, including 1997's "Nimrod" and 2000's "Warning."Like other punk and alternative rock bands, Green Day's music was often brooding, but not as inherently angry as some of its peer bands. One of its most widely known songs, "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" sounds to the casual ear like a feel-good tune you'd hear at an elementary school slide show, but it's actually a bitter break-up song."
American Idiot" borrowed the shape of the Who's "Tommy" and Pink Floyd's "The Wall" -- the songs were built around a central idea: the personal struggles of a fictional figure named Jesus of Suburbia, who calls himself "the son of rage and love." "Green Day gives vent to people's frustrations, both lyrically and sonically," said Steven Hoggett, Mayer's "American Idiot" choreographer.
Mayer's producing partner, the actor Tom Hulce, read the Variety comment and asked if he was serious. Soon thereafter, Mayer met with the band's representatives and pitched a simple concept for his adaptation. Green Day (guitarist and lead vocalist Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tré Cool), which hails from the East Bay suburbs and established itself at Berkeley's 924 Gilman Street club, visited New York to watch "Spring Awakening.""Thank God I didn't know they were at the show ahead of time," said Gallagher, an obsessive Green Day fan who won the best featured musical actor Tony for playing Moritz in "Spring Awakening" and stars as Johnny in "American Idiot."
The band liked what it saw and Mayer started sketching out his adaptation: Jesus of Suburbia (another name for Johnny) moves to a big city, meets St. Jimmy and Whatsername, who then battle for his soul, with Whatsername ("She's holding on my heart like a hand grenade") representing the best life can offer, and St. Jimmy ("I'm a teenage assassin") the direct opposite."It's a complicated story, and it's ambiguous," said Mayer, 49, who likes to wear casual, short-sleeved shirts, cargo shorts and sandals during rehearsals, and picked at fingernails he painted black in solidarity with the cast ("Even I am starting to turn punk," he said).
Although the band rarely visited rehearsals, Mayer -- who cites "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," "West Side Story," "Carousel" and "A Chorus Line" as formative musicals -- ran any number of "American Idiot's" central ideas by its lead singer. There would be three primary, largely invented couples alongside St. Jimmy, who more or less hovers over the action. "Three friends in a suburban wasteland wake up and realize their lives are going nowhere fast," Mayer said of the scenario. "These guys are searching for meaning and purpose in their own ways. They don't really find it, but they find what it isn't."
After several months of workshops and revisions, he showed the band last November a rough presentation. "I wanted to make sure that they were on board with the story I was shaping -- that was so embellished from what they had," Mayer said. At one point, Mayer presented his and musical supervisor Tom Kitt's reworking of "Last Night on Earth," a song from the band's new album, "21st Century Breakdown," that is a part of the musical."I looked over at my wife, Adrienne, and she was completely in tears," Armstrong said. "For me, the whole thing made me emotional. Look at what my career has come to. From playing dance halls in Boulder, Colo., 15 years ago and now there's this new interpretation into this rock opera musical. It's great."
With the IV bags and the hospital gurney dispatched to the Rep's repair shop, Mayer turned his attention to rehearsing "Know Your Enemy." Fans of the band know that the Green Day song is also from "21st Century Breakdown," but it plays a central role in the musical.Mayer and his largely twentysomething cast -- led by Gallagher, Rebecca Naomi Jones as Whatsername, Christina Sajous as Extraordinary Girl and Tony Vincent as St. Jimmy -- are not aiming to ape Green Day's musical style, an amalgam of hammering drums, crashing guitar chords and Armstrong's distinctive voice, which somehow manages to be both nasal and harmonious.
Instead, working with musical supervisor Kitt ("Next to Normal," "High Fidelity"), Mayer is rearranging Green Day's songs, seeking to give them narrative muscle by assigning singing parts to specific characters, changing keys, instrumentation (cello, violin, viola -- and even an accordion) and adding any number of choral harmonies for the 19-member cast."Know Your Enemy," for example, is mostly sung by St. Jimmy, essentially the alter ego of Gallagher's Johnny, one of the show's suburban, working-class kids searching for meaning -- and facing a possible visit to Middle East combat -- in the very recent past. "It's post 9/11, but pre-Mission Accomplished," Mayer said.
When St. Jimmy summons a gang of hoodie-wearing singers (with muscular movement choreographed by Hoggett) to surround Johnny, the lines "Bringing on the fury/The choir infantry/Revolt against the honor to obey" take on an entirely new meaning: Rather than a question-authority protest from an unnamed speaker, "Know Your Enemy" becomes St. Jimmy's call to arms.Similarly, when the Extraordinary Girl sings the "Extraordinary Girl" lyric, "Some days he feels like dying," and you see wounded soldiers in a Saudi Arabian hospital, the meaning shifts graphically.
"When I originally wrote the record, it was more about different symbolisms; it was not really a linear story," Armstrong said of an album that was intended to be a denunciation of the George W. Bush administration. "It was just what these people represent. Now there's definitely a struggle between the characters. There's moments where I thought he made the songs better. He interpreted it in a way where he turned it into a story."
In a way, "American Idiot" presented Mayer, whose theater credits include the Tony winners "Thoroughly Modern Millie" and "Side Man," a twist on the challenge he faced with his coming-of-age mash-up "Spring Awakening." Mayer used songs by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater to inject emotion and energy into Wedekind's potentially remote narrative about adolescence.With "American Idiot," there's no traditional book to propel the tale forward, and the music can't do all the heavy lifting (a handful of letters that appear in some of Green Day's "American Idiot" liner notes are read between songs). This music was not a "Spring Awakening" interlude, but the direct language of the "American Idiot" story. "The closest example is opera, because the songs have to do everything," Mayer said.
Opera, of course, appeals to older patrons, as does a lot of theater. Though 23% of Berkeley Rep's single-ticket buyers last season were under 30, half of the season ticket buyers were 55 and older. "But we have an adventurous audience that is storyteller-driven," said Susie Medak, the managing director for the theater, which has sent four shows to Broadway in the last four years: "Bridge & Tunnel," "In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)," "Passing Strange" and "Wishful Drinking."The ultimate test will be whether Mayer and his collaborators can create in "American Idiot" something that simultaneously advances and is faithful to a beloved album. "If people come to this show and they don't think they're hearing Green Day," Kitt said, "then we've done a disservice."
09-12 - RISK-TAKERS BET ON GREEN DAY MUSICAL
When Michael Mayer reworked Frank Wedekind’s play “Spring Awakening” into a pounding, rock-infused musical, he didn’t have to worry about what the German author would think of the overhaul — Wedekind died in 1918. The situation was very different when Mayer went to work on his musical reimagining of Green Day’s 2004 punk rock album “American Idiot”: the band would be looking over Mayer’s shoulders at every turn.
[Full article at LA Times]
09-05 - AMERICAN IDIOT MUSICAL BEGINS CA RUN
Johnny, Extraordinary Girl, Whatsername and St. Jimmy - characters from neo-punk group Green Day's 2004 "American Idiot" album - officially become part of the American musical theatre landscape Sept. 4 with the first preview of a new musical of the same name.
Produced by not-for-profit Berkeley Repertory Theatre in Green Day's Bay Area stomping ground, American Idiot stars Tony Award-winning actor John Gallagher, Jr., who reunites with Michael Mayer, his Tony-winning director from Spring Awakening. The project, co-conceived by Mayer and Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, will play the Rep to Nov. 1 (which represents a recently announced three-week extension, the tickets for which do not go on sale until Sept. 9). Opening night is Sept. 16 at the Rep's Roda Theatre.
Gallagher (who won a Best Featured Actor Tony for his work as Moritz in Spring Awakening) plays Johnny, leading an ensemble of 19 young performers that also features Matt Caplan as Tunny, Michael Esper as Will and Tony Vincent as St. Jimmy with Mary Faber as Heather, Rebecca Naomi Jones as Whatsername and Christina Sajous as Extraordinary Girl.
Berkeley Rep presents the show in association with Tom Hulce and Ira Pittelman, the lead producers of the 2007 Tony-winning Best Musical Spring Awakening.
"We've been working with the cast on this show for the past several months," Armstrong said in an earlier statement, "so we've seen first-hand what amazing actors they are. We continue to be impressed with how they are handling and interpreting the material. Their talent has truly brought the album to life in a really incredible way."
"This wildly gifted company is investing every fiber of themselves in this material," Mayer, the 2007 Tony winner for Best Direction of a Musical, stated. "They're bringing depth and passion to their characters, and singing the shit out of the songs. Watching them inhabit the kinetic dynamism of Steven Hoggett's brilliant choreography takes my breath away. It's a rare honor to be blessed with such devoted and spectacularly imaginative performers."
Green Day won two Grammys - Best Rock Album and Record of the Year - for its multi-platinum "American Idiot," which sold more than 12 million copies worldwide.
Here's how Berkeley Rep characterized the show: "With an onstage band, American Idiot follows working-class characters from the suburbs to the city to the Middle East. In an exhilarating journey borne along by Green Day's electrifying songs, they seek redemption in a world filled with frustration. This high-octane show includes every song from the album, as well as several songs from Green Day's new CD, '21st Century Breakdown.' The world premiere takes off at Berkeley Rep, the Tony-winning playhouse that launched last year's provocative rock musical Passing Strange."
Matt Caplan (Tunny), a guitarist who has released three CDs, appeared on Broadway in Rent and South Pacific, on TV in Fox's "New Amsterdam," and on film in "Across the Universe" and "Painting Abby Long.
Michael Esper (Will) made his Broadway debut last fall in A Man for All Seasons. His many other credits include the recent premiere of The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures by Tony Kushner.
Mary Faber (Heather) performed on Broadway in Avenue Q. She has also been seen Off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, and the York Theatre Company.
John Gallagher, Jr. (Johnny) earned a Tony Award for his portrayal of Moritz in Spring Awakening. His other credits include Rabbit Hole on Broadway; Current Events, Farragut North, Kimberly Akimbo and Port Authority Off-Broadway; and films such as Woody Allen's "Whatever Works" and Kenneth Lonergan's "Margaret."
Rebecca Naomi Jones (Whatsername) performed in Passing Strange at Berkeley Rep, Off-Broadway, on Broadway and on film. Previously, she toured with Caroline, or Change; Little Shop of Horrors; and Rent; her recent credits include This Beautiful City and Wig Out! at Vineyard Theatre.
Christina Sajous (Extraordinary Girl) appeared in the national tour of Rent. Her New York credits include King Lear with the Classical Theater of Harlem and Wild Party at Culture Project.
Tony Vincent (St. Jimmy) has performed on Broadway in Jesus Christ Superstar and Rent, and in London and Las Vegas in We Will Rock You. He has performed as the frontman for the rock band Queen on several occasions, including Queen Elizabeth's Golden Jubilee and Party in the Park.
[Full article at Playbill]
09-03 - PLAYBILL
Berkeley Repertory Theatre announced on Sept. 3 that its world-premiere production of Green Day's new musical, American Idiot, will get three added weeks. The production begins Sept. 3 and will now play to Nov. 1 at the Rep's Roda Theatre.
Tickets for 24 new performances will go on sale to the public starting Sept. 9. The run was originally to play only to Oct. 11 in Berkeley, CA.
"Record-breaking sales and unprecedented demand for seats" prompted the extension. The show has built-in appeal: fans of the neo-punk group Green Day are interested to see how the "American Idiot" concept album characters and songs will come to life, and fans of the alt rock musical Spring Awakening want to see the latest work of its Tony Award-winning director (Michael Mayer), star (John Gallagher Jr.) and producers (Tom Hulce, Ira Pittelman). Hulce and Pittelman are attached to take the show from the not-for-profit Rep to a wider life if audiences and critics embrace the work.
[Full article at Playbill.com]
09-03 - VARIETY MAGAZINE
