If you’re like me, you’ve been a fan of Green Day for quite some time, and even if you weren’t a huge fan, you at least knew who they were. And when the album “American Idiot” came out in 2004, you knew it was a good one. You didn’t even have to really like their previous stuff to find something on the new album that really hit home. Whether it was the title song or “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” the album really seemed to strike at the core of just about anyone. And for Michael Mayer, what struck him was inspiration. It was clearly a rock opera just waiting to hit the stage, and after a few years of inspiration and collaboration, it premiered at the Berkeley Reperatory Theatre back in 2009. But this year, it finally really hit the big times, as it made its way to Broadway. It’s going to be opening this week on Broadway with almost all of the same cast from the original production, and the clamoring from Green Day fans is almost impossible to ignore.
The previews from last week have been jam-packed for this one-act musical that features almost no dialogue, instead using the music to tell the story of the main character, “Jesus of Suburbia”, who is named Johnny in the musical, as he and his friends try to escape their suburban life in favor of something else. One of the friends never even makes it through the starting gates, and yet another finds himself going to war. Johnny himself finds drugs and a girlfriend, and he crashes hard.
It’s a great story, and it’s clearly been thought through a great deal by both Mayer and Armstrong, the lead of the band itself. “American Idiot”, the album, and the follow up to it, “21st Century Breakdown,” are the albums used to create a rock opera unlike most others, and it’s definitely worth seeing.
