American
Idiot
Berkeley Rep
Berkeley, California
Through November 15, 209
Reviewed by Allison Ford
American Idiot,
currently playing at Berkeley Rep through
November 15th, 2010 will be coming to New
York soon, and it wants to tear the roof
off of Broadway. It just might do it, too.
The orchestrations and vocal arrangements
are incredible and explosive. The performances
from the leading actors, including 2007
Tony award winner John Gallagher, Jr. are
fiercely exhilarating. However, while the
creative team was busy translating Green
Day’s seminal 2004 album for the stage,
they forgot one tiny thing. The plot.
Despite the impressive
vocal gymnastics of the cast, and the chaotic
staging that perfectly captures the “information
age of hysteria,” American Idiot
isn’t really about anything. You could
make the argument that it’s about
youthful apathy in the media age, or you
could argue that it’s about the pressure
to be artistically successful and the agony
of selling out. But those are themes, not
plots. Themes and moods are great in a musical,
but they cannot substitute for characters,
conflict, drama, and resolution.
For all of its in-your-face
attitude and gloriously angry social commentary
(and it does have both), the show fails
to tell a fully realized story. It draws
on the existing personalities from the album
(like St. Jimmy and Whatshername) and fleshes
them out a little, but never truly answers
the important questions like Who are these
people and What are they doing here. The
songs are linked by a very tenuous arc involving
three friends who try to venture out from
their small town to make it in the big city,
with three very different outcomes. Gallagher
plays Johnny, the Jesus of Suburbia, everyman's
anti-hero who ends up on drugs. Will (Michael
Esper) hopes to leave the small-town life,
but gets stuck when his girlfriend gets
pregnant. Tunny (Matt Caplan) ends up in
the army. It’s as if they used every
angry-youth cliché in the book, and
the result is caricature, not character.
True to the spirit of the album, it’s
much more of a rock opera than a musical.
It’s a little Tommy with
a lot of Hair and a not-insignificant
portion of Rent thrown into the
mix. Like Tommy, it has amazing
music. Like Hair, it has youthful
rebellion and a chorus that plays various
ensemble parts throughout the show. Like
Rent, it has drugs and sex. But since
the story is so thin, the songs just end
up seeming like a series of vignettes. Some
of the scenes make sense, but some, to be
honest, don’t.
It’s not that the
show doesn’t have its flashes of brilliance.
Director Michael Mayer has worked much of
the same magic that he did with Spring
Awakening. “Favorite Son”
deftly comments on how society fetishizes
war heroes. “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”
is a quiet, acoustic moment in a show full
of cacophony, and it gives the song an emotional
weight it never seemed to have before. Yet
most of the other songs end up feeling less
like moments in a cohesive piece of drama
than standalone musical numbers in a Green
Day revue. By subverting the low expectations
and giving the songs the dignity of a story
to accompany them, the musical could have
been surprising and powerful. Instead, it’s
just loud and uneven.
American Idiot’s
lack of a plot might not be its undoing.
It’s still an enjoyable night of music,
and frankly, many modern Broadway-goers
may feel refreshed by a piece of theater
that doesn’t challenge their thinking
or broaden their horizons in any way. Plus,
it wouldn’t be the first musical to
succeed despite its apparent lack of plot.
How many casual observers can really elucidate
the plot of Hair or Tommy,
anyway?
The most unfortunate thing
about the show is that for all its talk
about exceptionalism and rejecting modern
commercialized values, it ultimately ends
up embracing them by feeling like a mass-produced
jukebox musical packaged for maximum box-office
success. The show is an amazing concert
version of the album, but not much more,
and why should anyone pay to hear actors
sing Green Day songs when they can sit home
and listen to the band sing their own songs
for free?
greenday.com/site/homepage.php
Update
January 12, 2010:American Idiot,
will move to the St. James Theater on Broadway
this spring, in time to be eligible for
the 2010 Tony Awards. American Idiot is
scheduled to begin preview performances
on March 24 and open on April 20, 2010.
Opa!
The Musical
October 8 - 25, 2009
Queens Theatere in the Park
Reviewed by Tammy Scileppi
Opa!…an
affirmation of life and love
Now is the time to grab
a chunk of Broadway….in Queens. Yes,
culture is alive and well in Queens. Opa!
The Musical, playing at Queens Theater
in the Park, takes hold of the viewer's
senses and lifts the spirits. It’s
a Greek tragedy put into music…with
a twist. And, even though it’s not
playing on or near Broadway, with the quality
of acting and singing in this musical, it
is definitely Broadway material!
Emotions run high
on the tiny make-believe isle of Efia as
our restless heroine, Sophia, narrates her
life to a priest in a series of highly charged
confessions. "Yaya," her ever-grieving,
draped-in-black, mother reads the ominous
coffee grounds in her cup that foretell
the future of her family. The other characters
seem to passively accept their dreary lives,
but Sophia is hungry for more; she dreams
about the “gold paved streets of America”.
As passions between lovers, husband and
wife, mother and daughter, flare, the truth
is ultimately revealed and a lesson is learned
by all: Sophia finally realizes that where
she has been all along was indeed her true
destiny. And the weary island folk, now
happy and revived, sing and rejoice….!
The play’s message: We are but a speck
in the Universe ((like Efia and its residents).
It may seem that the daily details of our
lives, our pathos and joy, our problems
and unrealized dreams are huge and at times,
overwhelming. As we struggle with disappointment
and discontent, what we seem to forget is
that sometimes, where we are, is where we
were meant to be all along. So, be true
to yourself and be open about who you are
to others…. and always live the life
of OPA!
The production received five awards from
the 2008 Midtown International Theatre Festival.
Opa! The Musical is part of the
2009 Greek Cultural Festival.
Book by Mari Carras & Laurel Ollstein
Music by Nicholas Carras & Donald Eugster
Lyrics by Mari Carras & Donald Eugster
Greek Choreography by Anthoula Katsimatides
Directed by Sam Viverito
An Equity Showcase Production Tickets $18.
Queens Theatre in
the Park|Flushing Meadows |Corona Park
