‘American Idiot’ LA Theater Review: 20 Years Later, Green Day’s Music Is More Than Just a Millennial Howl

“American Idiot,” the Green Day musical that opened Wednesday at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum, begins with visuals of Donald Trump.  

It’s a fitting start to director Snehal Desai’s updated staging of the 2010 Tony-winning musical, here a Deaf West Theatre and Center Theatre Group co-production performed jointly in spoken English and American Sign Language with both hearing and Deaf actors. A musical call to arms adapting Green Day’s seminal 2004 concept album of the same name – itself a Grammy-winning, post-9/11 indoctrination of the Bush years – the musical seethes with a rousing, underbelly rage that feels as appropriate today as it did 15 or 20 years ago. Projections of the Republican presidential nominee lead frantic snippets of our 24-hour news cycle in those opening moments, slapping the audience awake with a literal media overload before the production’s ensemble chants over the title song’s opening riffs: “Don’t wanna be an American idiot / Don’t want a nation under the new media.”

And it’s safe to say Donald Trump has no fan in Green Day. 

The veteran punk rock outfit hilariously came under fire earlier this year when, while performing on “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” frontman Billie Joe Armstrong had words for the former president, changing the lyrics to their 2004 anthem “American Idiot” to say he’s not “part of the MAGA agenda.” 

“Hilariously” because, well, what else did conservative pundits expect from a band who’s always rocked with anti-establishment, anti-authority and often anti-Republican rhetoric? Their catalog, and especially “American Idiot,” has long been a middle finger to a system that benefits the few at the expense of the many. 

The new stage production’s opening visuals from projection designer David Murakami are the only time we see Trump in the flesh onstage, but his presence is still felt in this present-day “American Idiot.” The musical again centers on three young men – Johnny (Daniel Durant), Will (Otis Jones IV) and Tunny (Landen Gonzales) – and its themes of suburban malaise, economic insecurity and fatalistic disillusionment are still the production’s beating heart. In other words, “American Idiot” doesn’t show Trump again, but it dramatizes the conditions of desperation that breed the groundswell of his support from a male populace that feels despondent and unheard. Restless angst permeates the snarls, contorted faces and rock star wails of its players – a red-eyed anger that wouldn’t feel out of place among Trump’s ranks. 

But don’t worry, “American Idiot” has at least a more optimistic ending than a rally peppered with MAGA hats. After fleeing their suburban life for the city and falling to a plague of societal demons, its three leads come out on the other side with a resolve to be better.

Will (voiced alongside Jones by James Olivas) is left behind in their small town with weed, booze and binge TV after an accidental pregnancy keeps him from breaking free to the city with Johnny and Tunny. Tunny (voiced alongside Gonzales by Brady Fritz) gets deluded by promises of male grandeur and enlists in the army before getting injured in an unnamed war. 

And our hero Johnny (voiced alongside Durant by Milo Manheim) makes it to the city in hopes of finding meaning, only for sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll to tailspin him into the throes of heroin addiction. He falls for a girl (Whatsername, played a scene-stealing Mars Storm Rucker), a beacon of light in the dark, only to snuff it. “Finally we’re getting somewhere,” he says. “Nowhere.”

Beyond being just the effective conceit of Deaf West’s inclusive storytelling, the fact that these men are played onstage by two actors apiece visually distills how their story of crushed dreams, alienation, addiction and abandonment are stories existing over and again in today’s America. We live in an epidemic of male loneliness, anger, toxicity. Where there’s one, there’s always another. It’s a beautiful and impactful visual brought to life by choreographer Jennifer Weber and ASL choreographers Colin Analco and Amelia Hensley, that, like Deaf West’s “Spring Awakening” before it, uses the company’s mission to enhance and illuminate the original work’s themes. 

And while the circumstance of its central men may be heartbreakingly prevalent, that doesn’t mean “American Idiot” has lost any of its punk edge. There’s a rage within the characters for which Green Day’s musical opus is a pitch-perfect match. Opening rock highlights like “St. Jimmy” and “Holiday” through to the down-tempo love song “When It’s Time” and Whatsername’s wailing kiss-off to Johnny’s addiction, “Letterbomb,” all make for one hell of a musical. 

It doesn’t all work – the rock opera’s minimalist book doesn’t quite fill in all the narrative blanks – but it captures a feeling and ignites the heart just the same.

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