I first saw Green Day’s AMERICAN IDIOT on Broadway and really enjoyed the spectacle of the vast production melding projections with jaw-dropping mid air acrobatics. I wouldn’t have imagined it working in a more intimate setting but director/choreographer Racky Plews has done an incredible job in reducing the spectacle at the Arts Theatre whilst retaining all the intensity of the original. If anything it actually works better now it’s more human in scale.The piece was originally conceived as a concept album in response to the atrocities of 9/11 and the story, such as it is, concerns three slacker friends who take different paths in life. One joins the army, another embraces fatherhood and another becomes a junky before reuniting at the end with a new understanding of what it means to be an adult. There’s virtually no dialogue and each rite of passage is portrayed through rock music.
For this current revival Sara Perks has designed an industrial wasteland, a bleak environment that serves as an appropriately grungy backdrop for the smelly, disillusioned protagonists. Plews introduces a whirlwind of random and scuffed-up objects which allow the cast to represent the different locations including vehicles, shops and drug dens.
The musicality is also superb; every scenario is attacked with blistering intensity by Aaron Sidwell, Alexis Gerred and Steve Rushton as the central characters. But the whole cast is excellent. The women have less to do but Amelia Lily (of TV talent show the X Factor) brings a little celebrity pulling power to proceedings.
If I’m picky I found the aggressive music a little samey after a while but it gives the few ballades even more of an emotional kick when they emerge.
When a show is as white hot topical as this one was, like RENT and SPRING AWAKENING, it dates very quickly. AMERICAN IDIOT is on the cusp of feeling like a period piece but for the moment it’s a piercing laser beam cutting through conventional West End musicals.
American Idiot is a piercing laser beam cutting through conventional West End musicals
There’s nothing else out there at the moment that’s as edgy and ultimately as pertinent to the agonies and ecstasies of disillusioned youth.
If you love a good weepy this revival of the first play written about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s is the show for you.