Green Day musical arrives in Scotland to bring punk ethos to musical theatre

Tales of growing up in the shadow of Bush hit the stage in a punk-pop musical version of Green Day’s American Idiot and, appropriately, jazz-hands and lavish dance routines are nowhere to be seen.

PUNK rock and musical theatre are not the most comfortable bedfellows – the anarchy, clamour and rebellion of the former just doesn’t square with the technical discipline and jazz-hands appeal of the latter. But there is a new show in town which succeeds in tapping into the raw energy of punk with the precision and rigour you would expect from a top-flight theatrical production.

American Idiot, the stage musical version of Green Day’s Grammy-winning album, successfully took San Francisco Bay Area punk to Broadway and is currently bringing together emo kids and seasoned theatre-goers with its new touring production around the UK. Last week it opened in Southampton to an audience rocking the black nail polish and guyliner look – and their chaperoning parents.

American Idiot is no singalongapunka jukebox musical with a storyline stringing together the hits. It is a show specifically inspired by the politicised punk concept album with which Green Day came of age in 2004. “The artwork on the album even says ‘Green Day presents American Idiot’ so it feels like a show already,” says director Michael Mayer, whose previous credits, in partnership with Amadeus actor-turned-producer Tom Hulce, include Spring Awakening, another youth-on-the-rampage punk rock production which was far from your conventional Broadway fare.

Mayer saw the theatrical potential in American Idiot from the moment he first absorbed the album and has overseen its development from initial stage concept through its maiden run at the Berkeley Theatre (in Green Day’s East Bay stomping ground), a popular transfer to Broadway and on to this latest touring production with a fresh – and younger – cast of kids who wouldn’t look out of place in the audience at a Green Day concert.

The stage version plays through the album in sequence but extrapolates more of a narrative from the abstract plot and characters created by the band. The central figure, Jesus of Suburbia, is personified in the role of Johnny, a smalltown boy who escapes to the city, meets his dream girl Whatsername, and is seduced, then brutalized by his demonic drugs-bearing alter ego St Jimmy. Johnny’s journey is contrasted with that of his two friends – Tunny, who enlists in the army, and Will, who repairs to the sofa with a bong on discovering that his girlfriend is pregnant. Their stories are personal and relatable but expressed through politically engaged lyrics that are darker and angrier than your average showtune.

“It was a wonderful opportunity to get in there and talk to an audience about what it’s like to be a young person given a set of circumstances that you didn’t ask for,” says Mayer. “It seems to me that the journey that these young people are taking is completely universal. But at the same time the specific politics of this period in our history in America has had a gigantic influence in the rest of the world. We’re all still living with the consequences of those years between Mission Accomplished [George W Bush’s controversial 2003 speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln] and Facebook. I was looking for a way to express my outrage and my disgust and I heard it loud and clear in this record.”

The story and sentiment of the show also resonate with the cast members. The spike-haired Alex Nee remembers hiding his copy of the album from his parents, because of its “parental advisory: explicit lyrics” sticker. Nee takes on the lead role of Johnny, and was celebrating his 21st birthday on the day of our interview. “We are the age of these kids and I can identify with the things they grapple with,” he says. “To be very cheesy, this feels like the dawning of the rest of our lives so it feels good to feed those questions and those struggles that I’m having in my own life.”

Thomas Hettrick, who plays Tunny with great vulnerability, puts it more succinctly: “Part of being American is being pissed off at America.”

“I think there might be a misconception that every American is obsessed with America and that we think we are the greatest country,” agrees Casey O’Farrell, who completes the trio as Will. Nevertheless, he confirms there have been walkouts when the show has played in the States. “So many people in the US have quarantined themselves in their community and they’re not open to our show. It’s sad to see people unable to accept a piece of theatre – because it is meant for entertainment, we’re not going to protest, we’re not doing the show outside the courthouse.”

One of the most impressive aspects of American Idiot is its fidelity to the sound and spirit of the album. Green Day were on board from the early stages. As Mayer developed the book, frontman Billie Joe Armstrong would supply additional songs, recorded for their follow-up album 21st Century Breakdown, in order to flesh out the narrative. The band played on the cast recording and Armstrong even took on the role of the charismatic St Jimmy for part of the Broadway run (and would be Mayer’s first casting choice should the proposed film of the show come to fruition).

For Mayer, it was fundamental that the musical not be some meek theatrical approximation of their energy. Rather than consign the musicians to the orchestra pit, there is a rock band on stage throughout the show, driving the performance and fuelling the buzz.

“We rehearsed for so long with just a keyboard but the minute we got the band in we were hitting it so much better,” says Kennedy Caughell, who plays Will’s girlfriend Heather. “I come from a very traditional musical theatre background, polite applause, take your bow. But here the kick drum is the heartbeat of the show so when the curtain rises and there’s that pulse, you hear the crowd and they’re so vocal. And the more they give, the more they get. It’s like an energy wheel.”

Some of the principals are musicians themselves and wield acoustic guitars most convincingly during the more sensitive interludes. O’Farrell plays in an LA rock band called Side/Winders and came to the show “straight off the rock’n’roll boat. As soon as the band walked in, I felt at home. And it’s great to have people singing the songs back to you. You can only imagine Billie Joe doing it for 100,000 people.”

Choreographer Steven Hoggett, headhunted for this show because of his work on Black Watch, experienced the intensity of a Green Day audience first hand when he tried out the moshpit at one of their gigs – all in the name of research, of course.

“It was mind-blowing, the energy is full-on,” he reports back from the frontline. “From the outside it looks like mindlessness but there’s fantastic camaraderie and almost an implicit code of conduct in there. Just to hurl yourself into a roomful of people, there is something spiritual to it.”

The power and physicality of the army sequences will be familiar to anyone who has seen Black Watch but it’s that moshpit experience which informs the exhilarating, thrashing pace of the piece.

“Punk is anti-choreographic but that idea of physical abandonment was definitely something we talked a lot about in the making of the show. I said from the top, ‘You’re not going to dance – you’ll move like demons for an hour and a half and it’ll kill you but you’re never going to dance.’”

Hoggett is a distinctive stylist and, thanks to his input, the cast do a fine job of articulating the inarticulate. “In lots of ways, it’s about the abuse of people’s bodies,” he says. “A guy sits and decays on a sofa, this guy goes to Iraq and gets blown all over the place and this guy obliterates himself on drugs in a big city.”

In staying true to the album, American Idiot ends on an unresolved note – no future, like the old punk sneered – before a moving, memorable curtain call which chimes with the celebratory release of the music.

“It doesn’t deliver the happy ending or all the stories getting tied up in a neat package the way that musicals are supposed to do,” says Mayer. “This is very open-ended and much more realistic, because that’s how we work as human beings. We don’t have lightbulb moments all the time, we figure things out in increments and we just hope that we’re making progress.”

• American Idiot is at The Playhouse, Edinburgh, from 22-27 October and the Clyde Auditorium, Glasgow, from 29 October until 3 November