Theater Review: GREEN DAY’S AMERICAN IDIOT (Deaf West and Center Theatre Group at Mark Taper Forum)

IDIOT IS AS IDIOT DOES

Unlike the jukebox musicals Mamma Mia and Escape to Margaritaville, which invented stories around the songs of ABBA and Jimmy Buffett, American Idiot — inspired by the eponymous 2004 rock concept album by the American punk rock band Green Day — has a book by lyricist Billie Joe Armstrong and original director Michael Meyer with about twenty lines of dialogue creating a wobbly superstructure on which to hang about 20 songs. Given that drugs play a significant role in what little plot can be discerned, the entire musical — which has been steadily produced since its premiere in Berkeley in 2009 and subsequent extended run on Broadway — feels like a drug trip. Disjointed, fleeting, intriguing, baffling, and frustratingly beautiful as well.

Daniel Durant (center) and the cast

The Cast

Now, after shuttering the Mark Taper Forum for a year to re-group, Center Theatre Group (CTG) re-opened the great theater beginning its new season with yet another production of American Idiot, a choice as baffling as the musical itself. With regional theatres producing bright and exciting new plays such as Leopoldstadt and Primary Trust, we get something that’s playing at your local college. And this is a show wherein keys to major plot points can come from a single vague line or movement; if you don’t get what was intended by it, you’re going to get lost.

The Cast

Otis Jones IV, Ali Fumiko Whitney, and James Olivas

This production, however, is co-presented by Deaf West, which had already transformed musicals Big River and Spring Awakening into bona fide hits by adding their trademark staging wherein deaf actors perform in ASL while hearing actors voice the roles. Maybe now the issues that plagued the three productions I’ve seen, including the tour presented by CTG at The Ahmanson Theatre in 2012, would be solved. Perhaps now it won’t be tough to follow the plot (even if there really isn’t one!), and the lyrics — always mostly lost behind the loud music — will finally be accessible given the use of supertitles.

Daniel Durant and Mars Storm Rucker (center) and the Cast

But that didn’t happen. This full-on, very expensive concert traded one set of problems for another, and even added more. Call it American Idol Idiot. I know the musical well enough, and I still got lost.

Last Wednesday the house was packed with the most palpably excited crowd I’ve ever seen at a Taper opening. Thespians, the deaf community, donors. It smelled of creativity, money, and people devoted to the arts, all of whom — including myself — were champing at the bit for the show’s success.

Kaia T. Fitzgerald (center) and the cast

Ten minutes in, I understood why CTG is producing this. Directed by CTG’s new artistic director Snehal Desai, this is a full-blown rock concert with industrial grids, a turntable, a lighting plot by Karyn Lawrence appropriate for Broadway (if not Madison Square Garden), Jennifer Weber‘s thrilling choreography, 19 amazing performers (deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing actors), and David Murakami‘s cleverly placed lyrics projected everywhere. This will attract all those youngsters who see the musical Six over and over (girls are the demographic of the moment for Broadway producers) and those who relate to angsty American kids (look what that has done for the imperfect Rent). Since Big River and Spring Awakening both went to Broadway, why not American Idiot? But the budget for this show would have paid for an entire season at the Mark Taper Forum, so if it does go to Broadway, it’s Los Angeles’s loss. (The show is selling so well that it has already been extended; as Armstrong wrote, “another needle in the vein of the establishment.”)

Mars Storm Rucker

 James Olivas, Otis Jones IV, Landen Gonzales, and Brady Fritz

In the opening number “American Idiot” we are introduced to three of the angstiest teens ever. These kids are so down on life that they make the cast of Rent look like Mouseketeers. Armstrong’s lyrics are sensational — these kids do NOT want to be another American idiot in “One nation controlled by the media / Information age of hysteria / It’s calling out to idiot America.” But it’s not a drag; the teen gloom is relatable and timely — elucidating why the album and the musical strike a chord with a mainstream audience as well. The majority of the songs are of the high decibel variety, infusing the raw power of punk with a melodic pop sensibility, but several are actually tuneful, especially those sung to acoustic guitar accompaniment in a pleasing Paul Simon manner. It’s a slam dunk that fans of concerts, Green Day, metal, or punk, will enjoy American Idiot. If you’re a fan.

If … and even then …

Milo Manheim and Daniel Durant

Mason Alexander Park (center) and the Cast

About 20 minutes into the 90-minute one-act phantasmagoria, the added layer of ASL and Open Captioning made the show more profound, but it also proved more difficult to execute. Bold and ambitious, Desai chose to turn this into a three-ring circus. So much so that when dialogue scenes began, the show didn’t breathe, it slammed to a halt. After about 30 minutes, it started to lose me, and halfway through — after incessantly eye-bobbing the head-bopping, gyrating, hair-twirling, near-continuous movement of an astounding ensemble — a sort of ennui set in and I was itching to get out of the theater.

The Cast

Otis Jones IV

Part of the reason I started to zone out was that closed captioning was in one spot, characters in another, voices in another, dances in another, the band was above on a platform, and — except for very few still sections — it was entirely too difficult to figure out what to focus on. Plus, the singing actors actually took on the character traits of the deaf artists — sometimes they intermingled and, at other times, they were on opposite sides of the stage. Where was the symmetry? And since it remains difficult to understand the lyrics, my partner — who has ADHD — found it maddening because he could only concentrate on one thing at a time. He chose to watch the lyrics. I watched the dancers.

Landen Gonzales (center) and the Cast

Daniel Durant and Milo Manheim (center) and the Cast

It doesn’t help that the characters seem to be representations of certain types and not real people, so that all the frenetic goings-on cannot hide the fact that not much is going on that we haven’t seen before. What we are following is the trajectory of three suburban youths. One of them stays in the suburbs and is forced to marry the sweetheart he has impregnated; as expected, he becomes a rather bored stoner. The second moves to the big city where he becomes addicted to the hard stuff that destroys the relationship he has with the “Extraordinary Girl” who initially feeds his addiction. The third, not fitting in with the city, goes to war and comes back injured to a nurse that comforts him (weirdly, the character that goes to war had been turned down by the Army for being deaf — so how did he get in the army? So confusing). As well as the cast brings all of this to life, the show-biz savvy doesn’t elucidate the show, it takes over. Finally, any authenticity is overcome by pure glitz.

It comes down to that old maxim, “If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like.”

Landen Gonzales (front) and Will Branner (back)