When young dirtbag punk trio Green Day signed to a major label in 1994, their first album, Dookie, captured the small pleasures of a disconnected working-class youth that was fast running out of options.
Their songs about getting high, jerking off and defiantly refusing to participate in the system were relatable and catchy – pleasingly melodic with 1950s doo-wop influences, coupled with California punk-style bass and drums. Pop-punk would later explode as a genre, in part to emulate Green Day’s singable raucousness.
Their ideas back then were scattershot, more informed by feeling than sociopolitical thought. But 10 years later, the band found their political voice and released their manifesto: American Idiot. Billed as a “rock opera”, the album was a sophisticated, horrified portrait of America in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the conservative Bush presidency, and rapidly disappearing opportunities for those living close to America’s poverty line.
American Idiot was a smash, selling 15 million records – and in 2010, a stage adaptation landed on Broadway. The album’s driving rock structure was coupled with songs from Green Day’s next album, 21st Century Breakdown, and caressed into soaring, edgy vocal arrangements and new orchestrations by the band and composer Tom Kitt, whose musical Next to Normal picked up a Pulitzer prize that same year.
For American Idiot’s Australian iteration, which opened in Brisbane over the weekend, director Craig Ilott wastes no time in linking Bush-era malaise to the current state of the United States under Donald Trump.
The show opens with a cacophony of news broadcasts featuring layers of Trumpian boasts and vox pops; in the middle of a frenzied travel montage, a member of the ensemble dons a “Make America Great Again” cap as characters snarl about fascist governments, while projections (by Optikal Bloc) show a disappearing highway dotted with a host of billboards warning citizens about “fake news” and Muslim immigrants. We’re shown glimpses of protests against the current government and signs arguing for women’s rights, and from the start there’s a suffocating sense these characters will be unable to find any way out of the noise.
Forming a loose story out of the album’s throughline concept, the rock opera centres on three friends – Johnny (Ben Bennett, a long way from his cutesy days on The Voice Australia), Will (Alex Jeans) and Tunny (Cameron Macdonald) – who have finally decided to leave their dead-end suburb and try to build a better life for themselves. Tunny seeks structure and advancement in the army, Johnny is on a quest to write songs and make sense of the world in the city, and Will never makes it out; his girlfriend Heather (Ashleigh Barlow, a startling emerging talent) is pregnant, and he must stay and raise the baby with her.
Of course, there’s no relief, joy or advancement to be found in any of their choices. Tunny has a traumatic experience in the war, Will resents his new family, and though Johnny finds love with a “runaway of the establishment incorporated” (Phoebe Panaretos, proving herself one of Australia’s most diverse music theatre performers with a rich, chameleonic voice), it’s immediately compromised by his burgeoning drug habit.
That habit grows into a delusion, taking the shape of a charismatic drug dealer known as St Jimmy: the “suicide commando that your momma talked about … the product of war and fear that we’ve been victimised”. St Jimmy lurks on the edges of Johnny’s life, this manifestation of his darker side. He pulls Johnny away from Whatsername and back to drugs at every opportunity, looking for mayhem rather than love or fulfilment.
The role of St Jimmy was originally played by a stage performer, but the Broadway production quickly established a tradition of inviting rock stars to take on the role. It has been played by Green Day’s own frontman, Billie Joe Armstrong, AFI lead vocalist Davey Havok, and even Melissa Etheridge.
For its Australian premiere, the show has two legends of the local alternative music scene on the cast, both of whom fronted bands that were hitting hard as Green Day released Dookie: Chris Cheney of the Living End (who performed on opening night to constant bellowing cheers), and Phil Jamieson of Grinspoon, who will take over the role later in its run.
Cheney’s voice is a natural fit for the show. The Living End also brought in 50s rockabilly elements to flesh out their furious punk numbers, and for Cheney, this role is not a big leap from singing about being a “needle in the vein of the establishment” from his band’s career-making hit Prisoner of Society.
With an explosive cast of top-notch rock vocalists, eye-catching choreography by Lucas Newland, and a sublimely loud backing band led by Glenn Morehouse and Nik Pringadi, Illot’s production clings to the show’s two biggest moods – rage and love – to craft a 90-minute thrill ride through protest-punk and rock’n’roll despair.
Ilott’s work on rock shows starring iOTA, such as B-Girl and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, have cultivated his talents to be a natural fit for this musical; he allows flecks of humour and tenderness to break the wall of sound with just enough bite to still feel relevant, and he doesn’t try too hard to make perfect sense of the show, instead letting it run purely on emotion – and it never runs out of fuel.
As a rock opera, American Idiot is more like Hair than Jesus Christ Superstar or Rent; it’s built on situational concepts and song scenes rather than a thorough narrative, and like Hair it uses rock music to tap into a struggling and stifled generation haunted by war and aimlessness, with lyrics that serve more as statements and ideas than plot drivers.
This is both American Idiot’s greatest asset and its biggest downfall. It can’t flesh out most of its characters, especially its women, beyond broad strokes, and its ending can seem abrupt or underexplored without extremely precise direction. But it’s open enough to interpretation that it engages any audience, allowing them the space to project their own dissatisfaction on to the characters. And its music is strong enough to hold you in its thrall: you want to descend with these characters, even when they’re barely formed.
American Idiot is a long, loud scream into the void of modern dystopic suburbia. Built on restlessness, hopelessness and loss, it offers no solutions and no escape from a world run by conservative, fear-mongering politicians, vacillating between glorifying apathy and pleading for grassroots disruption. In the end, it doesn’t tell us which is better. It just shows us our social decay and leaves us to make up our minds.
• American Idiot is runs at QPAC until 12 March 2017, in a Brisbane exclusive season
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