"American Idiot" Brings Punk to Broadway

Broadway producers have been conducting a secret guerrilla war over the past year.  Their unsuspecting prey: straight guys in their late 20s to early 40s who usually go to see a musical only when their mom is celebrating a birthday or their girlfriends or wives make attendance a prerequisite for post-show nookie. 

The current revival of Hair, the original rock musical, was the first salvo, although it aimed more at Baby Boomers.  It was quickly followed by Rock of Ages, the boisterous but amiable tribute to the big-haired metal bands of the ‘80s.  There have even been a few outlying skirmishes like the emo-musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson that is running at the Public Theater through May 30. 

But last week, they rolled out the heavy artillery: American Idiot, a stage version of the eponymous 2004 concept album by the punk revivalists Green Day opened at the St. James Theatre, where in recent years such Broadway classics as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Gypsy have played.

The guys sitting in the row behind my sister Joanne and me probably think of a forum as an internet site where people exchange gripes, a gypsy as a punch line in a Monty Python routine, and a Broadway musical as something to be avoided at all costs. But there they were, four abreast, bottles of beer in hand (the audience is allowed to carry drinks to their seats) and fists pumping in the air as the guitars in the on-stage band screeched the title song that opens the show.

If you’re a diehard traditionalist, you may not like their being there or the show they’re championing.  For this is really more a concert than a musical. The show is nearly all sung through and the lyrics are hard to follow without the album notes in hand or the words emblazoned in your memory from hours of repeat play.

Nor is there much of a book for American Idiot. The sketchy plot (concocted by Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong and the show’s director Michael Mayer, who won a Tony for the rock-inspired Spring Awakening) follows the lives of three blue collar guys who make bad choices—one becomes a teen dad, another signs up to fight in Iraq and the third is seduced into drugs by a Mephistophelean dealer known as St. Jimmy. (The bar in the St. James lobby has been temporarily named after the dealer and, clueless as I am, I thought at first that it was a play on the theater’s name). 

But if you’re a more free-thinking fan of Broadway musicals then you may find yourself rooting for American Idiot. Its music isn't my genre of choice but I couldn’t help but respond to the enthusiastism of the young folks in the audience. Just as at the Metropolitan Opera House, the most avid and vocal fans are in the cheap seats up in the rafters. And so while, the greyheads around me in the orchestra sat largely stone-faced, the shaggy-haired ones in the balcony cheered after each number (click here to watch some highlights from the show).     

Even I appreciated how Mayer pulled all kinds of tricks out of his hat (including aerial ballets) to camouflage the missing narrative. Christine Jones’ arresting set design is anchored by three dozen TV screens of different sizes that attempt to supply a storyline with news images from the last decade. 

The energetic 19-member cast, lead by Spring Awakening’s John Gallagher, Jr. and the lovely and affective Rebecca Naomi Jones from Passing Strange, barely stops moving throughout the show’s 90 minutes, although I wish Steven Hoggett’s choreography had been less derivative of the moves Bill T. Jones did for Spring Awakening.  I also wish Mayer had treated the black male characters less stereotypically; if the black guy in one number in the second act had a larger codpiece it might have poked me in the eye and I was sitting in the eighth row.

Green Day’s melodies, including some of the band's other songs interpolated into the score, are catchy enough but, at heart, this is a jukebox musical, which means what book there is has to be gerrymandered around the songs. I wish Armstrong (who has professed to have been a show-tune geek as a kid) and his bandmates had written an original score. But judging from the response of the guys sitting behind me, the show seems well on its way to winning the hearts and minds of its target audience. 

Rocking out with "Rock of Ages"

As soon as I hear about a new jukebox musical, I call my sister Joanne. She loves them. And she’s not ashamed of that. It’s been eight years but I still regret rushing her out of the Winter Garden before she’d finished bopping out to Mamma Mia!’s curtain call reprise of “Dancing Queen.” And I knew Good Vibrations had no chance when she tried to hurry me out of that theater. So it was a no-brainer to ask her to go with me to see Rock of Ages.

Unlike Mamma Mia! (ABBA) or Good Vibrations (The Beach Boys) or All Shook Up (Elvis), Rock of Ages isn’t built around the songbook of one artist. Instead, it’s a kind of three-dimensional tribute album to the arena-rock era of the ‘80s (Pat Benatar, Bon Jovi, Journey, Styx). The musical’s first-time lead producers say they got the idea for the show when they heard a Journey song on the radio and thought it would be great to have a whole theater of people singing along to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” (click here to read a New York Times article about the making of the musical).

I have to confess that I didn’t know the Journey song because it came out during that period of music, between ‘70s folk rock and disco and ‘90s grunge and gangsta rap, that I tuned out entirely. What excited me about seeing Rock of Ages is its policy of in-seat drink service during the performance. Just the idea of that has appalled many traditional theatergoers (“I hope you don’t sit next to some hurling college student,” my husband K said as I was leaving home for the theater that night). But I was willing to take the risk for a chance to kick back and sip a little chardonnay while I watched a show.

The wine ($10 bucks for a big plastic cup that contained very little of the grape) was only so-so. But it was amusing to watch the waiters scoot up and down the aisles in a Grouch Marx crouch as they looked for thirsty customers and tried to stay out of people's sight lines. Somehow they missed the woman sitting in the row in front of Joanne and me, who kept waving and flashing one of the mini-lights the ushers handed out and that our waiter said would summon drink service. It didn’t. She bolted for the bar at intermission.

To my surprise, however, the real fun was on stage. Now let me say it as clearly as I can: this is not a good show. But let me also say this: it’s a totally entertaining show. The boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl plot is predictable and silly and the jokes and Kelly Devine’s pole-dancing-centric choreography are cheesy. But Rock of Ages doesn’t pretend to be otherwise. Book writer Chris D’Arienzo and director Kristin Hanggi have made sure that when you laugh, you’re laughing with them, not at them. This is a Xanadu for straight guys.

The action takes place in a soon-to-be demolished rock club on L.A.’s Sunset Strip. The boy, a recent arrival from the Midwest with dreams of rock stardom, is winningly played by Constatine Maroulis, a finalist from the fourth season of TV’s “American Idol,” which is turning out to be quite a farm team for Broadway. The waitress he loves is played by the talented Broadway vet Amy Spanger. The other man, the lead singer of a hit rock band who temporarily lures her away, is James Carpinello, who, as his Playbill bio points out, has become the king of juke box musicals with roles in Saturday Night Fever and Xanadu (although he broke his foot before opening night). The crowd-pleasing role of a Cabaret-style emcee is played by Mitchell Jarvis, who looks like the love child of Jack Black and Norbert Leo Butz and gets extra points from me for one of the funniest Playbill bios I’ve ever read.

The music is LOUD. But the songs are nicely integrated into the flimsy plot. And hearing them is what most of the people who will go to see Rock of Ages will care about. And they won’t all be aging Gen-Xers either. Music video games like “Guitar Hero” have created a whole new audience for rock music and those young fans will get a kick out of this too. The producers (all 25 of them) are doing everything they can to woo both of these groups to Broadway. Instead of holding audience talkbacks, they've invited real arena bands to play after some performances. And in a move that I hope will catch on, they've capped the ticket price at $99. Rock on!