Musical recommended for Green Day fans

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This article was published 24/02/2017 (2615 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Befitting its edgy origins as a punk rock-ish CD, American Idiot is a musical that should come with a content advisory.

Warning: American Idiot is a musical recommended for Green Day fans who can recite the lyrics of every single song on the 2004 album of the same name. All others may be lost at sea.

Also, there’s some swearing.

The album was an attempt to portray the jittery, jingoistic post-9/11 years of the Bush administration, centred especially on the waging of a bogus war in Iraq.

For the year 2017, director Simon Miron has retooled the premise so that it takes place in the year 2020 after — horrors — President Donald Trump has won a second term.

That background doesn’t really get explored in a meaningful way, as Miron concentrates on a trio of young friends preparing to cut loose from the constricting small-town environs of Jingletown. That plan is quickly jettisoned when one of their number, Will (Toby Hughes) discovers his girlfriend Heather (Katie German) is pregnant. That leaves Johnny (Michael Cox) and Tunny (Colleen Furlan) to go to the big city themselves.

Johnny finds himself effectively torn between two loves. Whatsername (Stephanie Sy) is a beautiful city girl. St. Jimmy (Brittany Hunter) is a human personification of Johnny’s growing heroin addiction. (If you don’t know this going in, you may think St. Jimmy is merely a contemporary iteration of the classic vamp character, an amoral sophisticate leading our hero to ruin. Certainly, Hunter is directed to play her with those broad melodramatic strokes.)

Tunny, exhausted by the cynicism and apathy around her, joins the army. Will, meanwhile, loses Heather to a rock star and is left to stew in his own small-town juices, augmented by pot and alcohol.

A co-production of Winnipeg Studio Theatre and White Rabbit Productions, American Idiot is a gutsy choice of musical, but it’s not entirely successful. Familiarity with the source material is pretty much essential. If you come to it fresh, it’s difficult to interpret what narrative there is, since rock music lyrics aren’t any more decipherable on the musical theatre stage than they are in concerts. (During the Friday evening show, this issue was exacerbated by performers’ mikes fading in and out as well as good old-fashioned feedback whine, a disservice to the tight four-piece house band led by music director Paul DeGurse.)

Tone is a bit of a problem too. Raging against the machine may be all part of the punk ethos, but an excess of defiant, fist-pumping pique over an intermission-free 90 minutes starts to feel a little joyless after a while.

The performers do what they can on an impressive, video screen-adorned, industrial-grunge set designed by Jamie Plummer. Michael Cox has an especially lovely voice as Johnny, presumably the proxy of Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, and shows his strength in the more plaintive songs, such as Boulevard of Broken Dreams. If you’re accustomed to hearing Hughes sing in the context of the musical improv he does with Outside Joke, he here demonstrates a strong, resonant voice not seen enough in straightforward musical theatre. Colleen Furlan, taking a role originally performed by a man, has pipes to break your heart, but, alas, no song to deliver on that promise.

 

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing