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  1. Culture
19 October 2012

Mossman on music: American Idiot

The Green Day-inspired musical reviewed.

By Kate Mossman

The new Green Day musical reminds me of the bit in Naked Gun 33 1/3 where they’re reading out the Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress. “Fatal Affair: One woman’s ordeal to overcome the death of her cat, set against the background of the Hindenburg Disaster”; “Basic Analysis: One woman’s fight against a yeast infection, set against the background of the tragic Buffalo Bills season of 1968”. Billie Joe Armstrong’s two-hour stage show is one man’s failure to put his trousers on, set against the backdrop of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.

It is churlish to criticise the plot of a Juke Box musical. Queen’s We Will Rock You follows a group of “Bohemians” fighting against “Radio Gaga” (processed music, boy bands) and searching for the elusive “Brighton Rock” (a guitar buried in a cave); Rock Of Ages has developers trying to knock down the club where all the characters hang out, simply to facilitate a segue into Starship’s “We Built This City”. In many ways, the worse the link, the more fun that moment of recognition.

But there’s something grim about Green Day’s attempt to turn their Grammy-winning concept album (“a response to the realities of the post 9/11 era”) into a stage musical – not because the subject is too heavy, but because, judging by how fearfully they tiptoe around it on stage, the “promise” of 9/11 has simply been used to put bums on seats.

Of course you don’t want to see people dancing round the Twin Towers (and you don’t). I’m not living in America: perhaps this masterpiece of vaguery worked better there – it managed 421 nights on Broadway, though Armstrong had to start appearing in it himself in order to up the ratings. But two dozen TV screens broadcasting a garbled narrative about all sorts of nasty things like AIDS and earthquakes (and terrorism) while lead character Johnny cries “I’m fed up of afternoons of shit-talking and blah-fucking-blah” is not a poignant rumination on an era, and shouldn’t be billed as one.

In Green Day’s original 2004 album, Johnny was called Jesus of Suburbia. He met a punk freedom fighter and fell in love with a woman (called Whatsername) who represented “mother revolution”. It wasn’t Bertolt Brecht but it meant something – it was impassioned, and ambitious, and bold for a snarky little punk rock band to come out with a song called “Wake Me Up When September Ends”.

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It’s assumed that the musical-going public are too thick to handle allegory, so rather than those abstract figures we’ve got Johnny, Tunny and Matt. The former becomes a junkie, and when that doesn’t work out he comes home deducing, “She was right, I am an idiot … This is my rage. This is my love. This is my town.” Apart from its visualisation of chronic loserdom in Johnny, the show’s political content is focused on Tunny, who is seduced into war with the baffling libretto “[his] dream turned red, white and blue! But I thought that good guys don’t wear red, white, and blue! Nobody seems to agree on anything these days!” The stage is briefly awash with dancing soldiers but no actual war is mentioned, just as no president is mentioned (there’s a truncated clip of George Bush’s “you’re either with us…”) and no real-life, world-changing event.

Stage shows generate regular cash and introduce your back catalogue to a new audience. Billie Joe is not exactly up the dumper – Green Day’s new album ¡Uno! has been met, as the saying goes, with a mixed critical reaction, he’s now 40 and he went into rehab last month following a meltdown on stage in Las Vegas: it’s not hard to guess why someone thought this musical would be a good idea. But Green Day, unlike Queen or Abba, don’t have enough hits to fill a full-length stage show – just three or four; they’d have been better off harnessing their “slacker” thing and going down the Avenue Q or Loserville route, if they really wanted to see their name in lights. And maybe there is a “post-9/11” musical to be written one day – by Stephen Colbert, or David and Amy Sedaris, or Jon Stewart, or maybe all four of them together. Well, maybe.

Green Day’s “American Idiot” is at the Edinburgh Playhouse next week and on a national tour, ending at London’s Hammersmith Apollo in December.

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