Green Day’s musical American Idiot, written by Billie Joe Armstrong and Michael Mayer, opens with seizure-inducing lights and a frenzied cast kicking and leaping in front of several televisions. Immediately, the audience is pumped, grinning, and positive that this euphoria will be maintained throughout the entire show. The musical, an adaptation of Green Day’s 2004 album of the same name (and including many songs from t1he more recent 21st Century Breakdown), follows the story of Jimmy (John Gallagher, Jr.) and his friends Will and Tunny (Michael Esper and Stark Sands).
As the curtain rises, the audience gets its first taste of humor which infuses what little dialog is in the show. With a blunt and earnest vulgarity Jimmy states, “I jerked off into oblivion… and I forgot to take a shower.” The audience is surprised into laughter; Jimmy’s face is deadpan. This same humor guides us through the heavier topics of the show—drugs, war, love—and makes sure we’re never so drowned in seriousness that we don’t enjoy the show.
One of said serious moments arises in a memory of September 11. As Jimmy sings “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” the actors stare up at something behind the audience. A man stumbles forward and stares in the direction the rest of the crowd stares in, expressing a speechless, slack-mouthed shock all too familiar to the audience. Or perhaps the point where Tunny, who has enlisted in the army, is wounded—this is enough to make the audience’s heart break—but not because we feel a connection with Tunny’s character.
While the musical excels at electrifying the audience, the characters were too vague for the audience to form a relationship with the actual characters. This is both the biggest flaw as well as biggest success of the musical. The characters are types, not people. They show us what Americans have gone through, and what we are. The characters are slates on which we draw our fears, our emotions—ourselves. We all have had an Extraordinary Girl (Tunny’s love interest) or a Whatshername (Jimmy’s). Some of us have had to give up something to take on responsibilities, as Will does in choosing to stay with his pregnant girlfriend. And all Americans have felt the pressure of war, and the unwillingness to become an American idiot. If the aim of the show was to give us a place to see and start to understand ourselves as individuals and as a group of people, then American Idiot has succeeded.
2 Comments
It's Jimmy, not Johnny. -_____-
Erica's right. It's Johnny. Sorry, June!
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