Green Day’s American Idiot Musical on Broadway

Green Day’s American Idiot is an entire one act stage musical based on the Grammy Award winning concept album of the same name.  The musical first ran at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2009 before it was later moved to Broadway after doing remarkably well.  Beginning previews for American Idiot were shown at the St. James Theatre (hmm…Saint James, St. Jimmy, coincidence?) on March 24, 2010.  The show officially opened on April 20, 2010; talk about a “Green Day” indeed!

American Idiot follows a slacker named Johnny who has just realized that he hasn’t done anything with his life.  Johnny decides to look for a purpose as he leaves boring ol’ suburbia behind to experience all of the freedom and excitement life in the big city can offer.    

Most of the production’s scores are tracks taken from “American Idiot” while a select few are from the more recent “21^st Century Breakdown” album.  There are even a handful of b-sides as well as the unreleased “When It’s Time”, a song that Green Day lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong wrote for his wife!  All of the songs work nicely to help move the story along and seeing the songs go with the actions being shown on stage offer a glimpse into what Billie Joe must have been thinking of when he was writing these songs.  All of the young performers have amazing vocals and really do all have bright futures ahead of them.

But this isn’t just a musical with people singing covers of Green Day songs.  For a limited time only, Green Day’s Billie Joe played the role of St. Jimmy, the drug pushing alter ego of Johnny who threatens to completely derail his life.  I was lucky enough to see him and he was excellent as St. Jimmy.  Everyone in the cast including BJ appeared to be having fun as they performed.  At the end, Billie Joe called up Green Day bassist Mike Dirnt to stage to play “Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)” as the encore.   Over all, I really loved Green Day’s American Idiot and that’s really saying a lot since I don’t follow musicals and as a die-hard Green Day, I was, to be honest, pretty nervous about having one of my favorite albums being turned into a Broadway play (it could have been a "Fiddler on the Roof", but with way more guyliner).  Thankfully, Green Day’s fans can rest assured that the musical does justice to the iconic album that it’s named after. 
The show is scheduled to continue playing on Broadway until it becomes too expensive to produce, so you all have plenty of time to go see it; I highly recommend that you do.  Tickets for the show can be bought on TicketMaster, Broadway.com, and Americanidiotonbroadway.com.  Billie Joe will be starring as St. Jimmy between January 1st and February 27th while Melissa Etheridge will take over this role from February 1st to February 6th.  Get your tickets today!  The best seats to this punk rock opera are available on Wednesday and Sunday evenings!