In these trying days of super-storms and political peril, we have to celebrate wherever we can. And the reopening of the Mark Taper Forum is reason to break out in civic cheer.
Snehal Desai, Center Theatre Group’s galvanizing new artistic leader, is making his directorial debut with the company in a new production of “American Idiot,” the rock opera based on Green Day’s multiplatinum concept album. A co-production with Deaf West Theatre, the revival features a cast of deaf and hearing actors singing and signing their way through this pop-punk musical explosion of suburban angst and cultural alienation.
When I reviewed the 2009 world premiere at Berkeley Rep, I declared that the show “does what rock bands have set out to do from the beginning — lay down a style that defines a new zeitgeist.” “American Idiot” took a risk in borrowing a music video format to critique a sensationalizing, oversaturated media culture that made it difficult to feel, never mind think.
The book by Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong and Michael Mayer, the musical’s original director, stitched together story fragments taken from the 2004 “American Idiot” album and supplemented them with material from the band’s 2009 recording, “21st Century Breakdown.” The setting was the tumultuous early aughts, after 9/11 set the country reeling and President George W. Bush drummed us into war with Iraq.
Strange to say, but this awful period seems almost quaint by comparison with our current discord. “American Idiot” railed against the background noise of cable news. Today, we have TikTok rewiring our brains. Bush promoted what he euphemistically called “compassionate conservatism.” After losing his bid to retain the presidency, Donald Trump called for angry mobs to “fight like hell” or you won’t “have a country anymore.”
When I heard that the Taper was going to reopen with a new take on “American Idiot” right before the fraught 2024 presidential election, it sounded like perfect timing. We could all use an excuse to vent our anger and anxiety, and Green Day’s stylishly brash songwriting provides just the right outlet.
What I didn’t expect was to find the musical so dated. The story of three young suburban wastrels looking for a way out of the American capitalist wasteland struck me as a luxury we can’t really afford at this hinge moment in history.
My unexpected reaction stems from Desai’s misguided production. The music’s urgency is generalized into a blur. Instead of definition, the staging gives us a muddle of free-floating feeling.
I have previously been bowled over by Deaf West’s ability to find new expressive life in familiar musicals. “Big River” established the company’s musical bona fides. I was ultimately bewitched by the 2009 Deaf West-CTG revival of “Pippin” and was completely seduced by Michael Arden’s 2015 revival of “Spring Awakening” at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, before the company took it to Broadway.
But this new “American Idiot” seems at cross-purposes with itself. The staging lacks both synergy and focus. The casting of deaf and hearing actors — one to embody and emotionalize a character, the other to sing, speak and jam — fails to harmonize into a resonant or even intelligible interpretation. Our attention is splintered. The result is busy, breathless and barren.
There’s a serious casting problem at the heart of this revival. Daniel Durant, who was in the Deaf West production of “Spring Awakening,” takes on the lead role of Johnny, one of three friends desperate to escape the small, aimless, conformist world choking the life out of them. The role anchors a show that is more a collection of scenarios than a clearly delineated story. It’s essential, for this reason, that the actor playing the part can fill in what’s missing and become the musical’s compelling center.
Tony Award-winner John Gallagher Jr. from “Spring Awakening,” who played Johnny at Berkeley Rep and subsequently on Broadway, brought star power to this modern-day druggy rebel struggling to name his cause. Durant turns Johnny into a disheveled drifter. His performance made me imagine what the very fine actor Michael Cera might be like as David Berkowitz in a TV movie about the Son of Sam serial killer. I suspect that’s not quite what Armstrong and Mayer were going for in their book.
What makes this casting choice more puzzling is that Milo Manheim sings and plays guitar with a rock god’s swagger as the Voice of Johnny. The contrast with Durant’s lumpish Johnny makes no sense. Why cast a hearing actor with tremendous charisma next to a deaf actor who is made out (in costuming, grooming and general deportment) to be a schlub? There are other ways to get at inner conflicts without sacrificing theatrical magnetism.
The scenes with Johnny and his buddies are handled in a perfunctory manner that made it hard for me to invest in their plights or paths. Otis Jones IV’s Will, the character whose plans to run off with Johnny are upended by his girlfriend’s pregnancy, and Landen Gonzales’ Tunny, who chooses the military route as his answer only to be seriously wounded in combat, are treated almost as spectral presences, insubstantial and more or less tangential.
I kept trying to locate where Manheim, James Olivas (as the Voice of Will) and Brady Fritz (as the Voice of Tunny) were singing. This has not been my experience with Deaf West musicals in the past. This sense of dispersion, directly attributable to the casting and the direction, is only compounded by Takeshi Kata’s two-tiered, standard-issue industrial musical set
Jennifer Weber’s jumpy choreography doesn’t enhance the storytelling picture. I did appreciate David Murakami’s projection design. One video image of a highway at night was more eloquent than anything in the lead-up to Johnny’s Greyhound getaway.
The music, thankfully, fills the theatrical breach. The orchestra, discreetly visible on the set’s upper level, brings out the vibrancy of Tom Kitt’s arrangements and orchestrations. And the singing is glorious. Mars Storm Rucker as Whatsername, the girl Johnny shoots heroin with for the first time, seismically delivers the character’s emotionally vehement numbers. Mason Alexander Park brings a David Bowie-ish quality to St. Jimmy, Johnny’s fiendish drug dealer.
“American Idiot,” the show’s opening number, still rouses an audience with a mad-as-hell anthem that is as valid today as it was 20 years ago when the album came out. The head-bobbing in the audience made me wonder what a dance-party version of the musical might be like, something akin to the immersive staging of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s “Here Lies Love.”
But that’s probably asking too much from a theater just getting back on its feet. The good news is that the Taper is open again. Being there again, even with all these criticisms, felt deeply satisfying.
