nobody likes you, everyone left you...
Selected reviews of American Idiot's debut on Broadway--it opened last night:
From The New York Times:
"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! - only to transcend them through the power of its music and the artistry of its execution, the show is as invigorating and ultimately as moving as anything I’ve seen on Broadway this season. Or maybe for a few seasons past."
Full review right here, to avoid wall-of-textness.
From The Washington Post:
"Green Day's music has now reached Broadway, but the echoes it creates sound a lot like "Spring Awakening." Is there a hint of "Hair" in the deja vu you're sensing? A reminder of "Rent"? A trace of "Tommy"? A memory of "Movin' Out"?
Maybe it's simply that "American Idiot" -- a new musical built around the songbook of the popular alternative-rock trio, which opened Tuesday night at the St. James Theatre -- suggests that as the foundation of melodic drama, the rebellious-youth thing is getting old. Presented in a visually dazzling package, with coolly aggressive dance steps and the group's exhilarating songs, the show qualifies as a pulsating album in three dimensions, a gallery of zestfully choreographed music videos.
The 90 minutes make for such stimulating spectacle, I would happily sit through them again. And yet, in its attempt to knit a story out of a band's discography, "American Idiot" comes across as ordinary. Too many other productions of recent vintage have taken us over this same rocky terrain, the landscape of youthful alienation. It's surprising how a show with enough imaginative candlepower to light a stadium can appear to have invested so little energy in illuminating its characters, or devising an involving narrative."
Full review here!
From The Chicago Tribune:
"NEW YORK - Stuck in filthy beds and La-Z-Boys and doped up on soda pop, Ritalin and somebody else's cocaine, the furious, alienated and unshowered youth of Green Day's “American Idiot” come to explosive life on the Broadway stage in a heart-pounding, punk-rock opera that sounds the unmistakable siren of generational shift.
Of course, some things in art and commerce never change. The younger generation has always seemed mysterious and exotic to the rattlers of traditional Broadway jewelry. If there's no Johnson or Vietnam, you can always use Bush and Iraq. Railing against the anesthetizing media never goes out of style.
And stage musicals have always needed soaring melodies, especially in the absence of fleshed-out characters or much of a book. So while putting up a show based on the 13 songs on a 2004 album from a bunch of Oakland, Calif., punks might seem like throwing away the rule book - which, to some extent, it is - Green Day is hardly the Sex Pistols. For that album, also titled “American Idiot,” the band penned what you could call punk with possibility: its inner, nihilistic fury leavened by aspirational dreams of make-believe, played in major keys.
And thus “American Idiot,” the show, delivers a thick, gorgeous head rush of a musical soundscape without current Broadway parallel. It turns out to offer the kind of sensual lushness that a lot more traditional musicals would kill to emulate. That's mostly due to the brilliance of Tom Kitt's orchestrations, adding violin, cello, weight and gravitas to the Green Day sound without blunting its aggressive edge. With the gifted director Michael Mayer spreading his eight-member band out across a beautifully cacophonous setting - more a video-filled installation, really - from Christine Jones that evokes a constant blaring of Fox News in an endless sea of 7-Eleven parking lots and crappy urban apartments, you get a stunning musical wash of all corners of human emotion."
Full text here.
SO. EXCITED. Even with the WaPo's "meh" sentiments.
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