It "doesn't make a lot of sense," Billie Joe Armstrong confessed, but Green Day are making a musical.
Yes, California's cheeky punk-pop princes, whose major-label debut took its name from a slang term for diarrhoea, are being adapted for the stage. This September, Berkeley Repertory Theater will mount American Idiot, a rock opera borrowing from Green Day's 2004 album.

"Who would have thought," said director Michael Mayer, "that one of the most brutally honest, eloquent, passionate, funny, and poetic theatrical responses to the post 9/11 world would be a Green Day record?" The answer, of course, is: "Not most people." But Mayer, who directed Duncan Sheik's recent Spring Awakening adaptation, fell in love with the American Idiot album even as he was working on a play about 19th-century German ennui.

"It was very much in my head all during that time," Mayer told the New York Times. "Sometimes I really would say things like, 'Why can't this have a groove like 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams'?'"
"Here was a new musical drama begging to be staged," Mayer explained, "this work of passion and vision and fierce intelligence seemed to me like the heartbeat of a generation of Americans who were fed up."
American Idiot was Green Day's seventh album, released in 2004. Buoyed by singles like 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams' and 'Wake Me Up When September Ends', it sold more than 12m copies worldwide. The musical will include every song on American Idiot, as well as music from the band's forthcoming album, 21st Century Breakdown.

Even if Green Day have embraced rock opera, they have never been concerned with plot. Armstrong, the band's frontman, admitted that American Idiot does not have "the most linear story in the world". There's something about "working-class characters from the suburbs to the city to the Middle East", according to a statement, with names like St Jimmy, Whatsername and Jesus of Suburbia.
"If you read [the album] in a certain way, you can pull out a multiplicity of voices," Mayer loftily explained. "[It's] a journey from apathy to action." We just hope the costumes are pretty.
American Idiot will be staged in Berkeley, California from 4 September to 11 October. The production is directed by Michael Mayer, with work by British choreographer Steven Hoggett. Tickets are already on sale.

Courtesy: The Guardian