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healingmirthI went to see a preview matinee of American Idiot today!
The really short version is that it was awesome, I had a great seat (first row center mezzanine) and if I could get away with it, I would buy each of my friends tickets for their birthdays to have an excuse to go see it at least a couple more times.
The medium short version is this:
This is not a happy show, which should come as a surprise to no one who's heard the album. Or heard any of Green Day's music, ever. It is, however, really entertaining, and even fun at times, though most of that is in the earliest songs. I went to a matinee, and was sitting a row in front of some 9-12 year old kids there with their parents. I hope those parents knew they were getting into, because I would not have brought my kids to that show without some serious talking about it first, no matter if the kids are huge Green Day fans. There is for-serious drug use and sexual content, and some (briefish) violent incidents.
It's a busy production. Many of the songs carry multiple storylines, and there's a fair amount of overlapping action, such as the part at the end of Holiday when I looked over and noticed oh, hey, Stark's taking off his clothes.
The staging is pretty consistent, with Will to house-left, Johnny center stage and Tunny to the right, so if you don't want to miss, y'know, someone's reappearance on stage, you know where to look.
And now for the long version -
I'm going to disclaim this part by saying that I haven't read any in-depth articles about either the show or the original album, so the conjectures about characterization are totally my own for now. I'm sure I'll go looking for more later when I'm less exhausted, but if you know of something, feel free to point me towards anything online.
It is hard-wired into my brain to split spoilery things from non-spoilery things, so I'm going to do that here, though I doubt it's warranted.
I haven't seen a production of Spring Awakening, just clips of the songs in other performances, so I can't draw any comparisons between the shows. I assume that most people will be looking to draw comparisons to Spring Awakening or Rent or, I don't know, Hair? It doesn't have as much heart as Rent, and it isn't a city story the way that is. These characters are less well-educated, either by school or by life.
Johnny (John Gallagher Jr.) does his job of winning the audience's heart early with some great slacker-humor suburban rage moments. As you'd expect from him, he owned his songs. He also definitely had the most material to work with in terms of a character arc, and I felt like he was totally in it the whole way through.
Will (Michael Esper) has the quietest story, as the guy left behind. Solid performance, but he spends most of the show sitting on the couch, drunk and/or high, and worried and/or lonely, and I'm not really sure what else to say about it.
Tunny (Stark Stands. Like you guys didn't already know that.) is the soldier story. He's the one with the tattoos, and maybe it's just me, but a bunch of tattoos, even a bunch of crappy, random ones, says a commitment to something, and that he's looking for something to be committed to, which makes it easy for me to say that's what he finds in the fantasy of joining the military. It's easy to cast his distrust or hatred of the establishment as a switch to be flipped.
Stark's singing was great, and his voice had a much clearer tone than I expected from the clips I'd heard before. As long as he had something to throw himself into, he went at it 100%, but I'm sad to say that I really lost any emotional connection to Tunny's story halfway through the show.
One of Tunny's featured numbers is unfortunately my least favorite track on the album (Extraordinary Girl). The interpretation is interesting in theory, a morphine dream about Tunny's nurse/girlfriend as a harem-style arab woman, as they fly around the stage, but by that point I was starting to lose hold of Tunny's arc. By the end of the show, I can't tell whether he ends up resigned or content or what, and honestly it's a little frustrating to me that his returning veteran feels so unconnected to the kid who left home.
I'm tempted to say that Johnny's the dreamer, where Tunny is the more manic the believer. Stark definitely rocked the energy and the crazy eyes in the opening numbers.
Speaking of crazy eyes, Theo Stockman was by far my favorite member of the ensemble. (and for bonus WTFery, his shout-out at the end of his Who's who blurb is "GABBA GABBA HEY!")
Whatsername, Heather, and all of the ensemble women were excellent. Sadly, The Extraordinary Girl (Christina Sajous) became about a hundred times less extraordinary as Tunny's girl than she was in the first half of the show. I blame the wonky long ponytail, I think. It seriously threw me off. The rest of the men were solid as well, but by merit of there being more of them, several of them were indistinguishable from each other to me, filler.
I feel like Johnny, Will and Tunny are competing for the most heartbreaking story in pretty much equal measure, but I never felt drawn in to their pain. I can see an argument for Will and Johnny's performances being intentionally superficial, despite their real struggles, if the characters are going through it all in a haze of booze and drugs. I am still a little frustrated in Tunny's general direction, though. I'm reluctant to say that Tunny stopped being a person when he started being a soldier, because that is absolutely the last thing I'd expect out of Stark's performance, but maybe I was just missing something, or maybe the character needs something else to demonstrate where he's at.
After the curtain, the whole cast came back with acoustic guitar to sing Time of Your Life as an encore, which was totally unexpected and completely awesome, as well as an extra few seconds for each of the ensemble to shine.
So, in conclusion. Yay!
The really short version is that it was awesome, I had a great seat (first row center mezzanine) and if I could get away with it, I would buy each of my friends tickets for their birthdays to have an excuse to go see it at least a couple more times.
The medium short version is this:
This is not a happy show, which should come as a surprise to no one who's heard the album. Or heard any of Green Day's music, ever. It is, however, really entertaining, and even fun at times, though most of that is in the earliest songs. I went to a matinee, and was sitting a row in front of some 9-12 year old kids there with their parents. I hope those parents knew they were getting into, because I would not have brought my kids to that show without some serious talking about it first, no matter if the kids are huge Green Day fans. There is for-serious drug use and sexual content, and some (briefish) violent incidents.
It's a busy production. Many of the songs carry multiple storylines, and there's a fair amount of overlapping action, such as the part at the end of Holiday when I looked over and noticed oh, hey, Stark's taking off his clothes.
The staging is pretty consistent, with Will to house-left, Johnny center stage and Tunny to the right, so if you don't want to miss, y'know, someone's reappearance on stage, you know where to look.
And now for the long version -
I'm going to disclaim this part by saying that I haven't read any in-depth articles about either the show or the original album, so the conjectures about characterization are totally my own for now. I'm sure I'll go looking for more later when I'm less exhausted, but if you know of something, feel free to point me towards anything online.
It is hard-wired into my brain to split spoilery things from non-spoilery things, so I'm going to do that here, though I doubt it's warranted.
I haven't seen a production of Spring Awakening, just clips of the songs in other performances, so I can't draw any comparisons between the shows. I assume that most people will be looking to draw comparisons to Spring Awakening or Rent or, I don't know, Hair? It doesn't have as much heart as Rent, and it isn't a city story the way that is. These characters are less well-educated, either by school or by life.
Johnny (John Gallagher Jr.) does his job of winning the audience's heart early with some great slacker-humor suburban rage moments. As you'd expect from him, he owned his songs. He also definitely had the most material to work with in terms of a character arc, and I felt like he was totally in it the whole way through.
Will (Michael Esper) has the quietest story, as the guy left behind. Solid performance, but he spends most of the show sitting on the couch, drunk and/or high, and worried and/or lonely, and I'm not really sure what else to say about it.
Tunny (Stark Stands. Like you guys didn't already know that.) is the soldier story. He's the one with the tattoos, and maybe it's just me, but a bunch of tattoos, even a bunch of crappy, random ones, says a commitment to something, and that he's looking for something to be committed to, which makes it easy for me to say that's what he finds in the fantasy of joining the military. It's easy to cast his distrust or hatred of the establishment as a switch to be flipped.
Stark's singing was great, and his voice had a much clearer tone than I expected from the clips I'd heard before. As long as he had something to throw himself into, he went at it 100%, but I'm sad to say that I really lost any emotional connection to Tunny's story halfway through the show.
One of Tunny's featured numbers is unfortunately my least favorite track on the album (Extraordinary Girl). The interpretation is interesting in theory, a morphine dream about Tunny's nurse/girlfriend as a harem-style arab woman, as they fly around the stage, but by that point I was starting to lose hold of Tunny's arc. By the end of the show, I can't tell whether he ends up resigned or content or what, and honestly it's a little frustrating to me that his returning veteran feels so unconnected to the kid who left home.
I'm tempted to say that Johnny's the dreamer, where Tunny is the more manic the believer. Stark definitely rocked the energy and the crazy eyes in the opening numbers.
Speaking of crazy eyes, Theo Stockman was by far my favorite member of the ensemble. (and for bonus WTFery, his shout-out at the end of his Who's who blurb is "GABBA GABBA HEY!")
Whatsername, Heather, and all of the ensemble women were excellent. Sadly, The Extraordinary Girl (Christina Sajous) became about a hundred times less extraordinary as Tunny's girl than she was in the first half of the show. I blame the wonky long ponytail, I think. It seriously threw me off. The rest of the men were solid as well, but by merit of there being more of them, several of them were indistinguishable from each other to me, filler.
I feel like Johnny, Will and Tunny are competing for the most heartbreaking story in pretty much equal measure, but I never felt drawn in to their pain. I can see an argument for Will and Johnny's performances being intentionally superficial, despite their real struggles, if the characters are going through it all in a haze of booze and drugs. I am still a little frustrated in Tunny's general direction, though. I'm reluctant to say that Tunny stopped being a person when he started being a soldier, because that is absolutely the last thing I'd expect out of Stark's performance, but maybe I was just missing something, or maybe the character needs something else to demonstrate where he's at.
After the curtain, the whole cast came back with acoustic guitar to sing Time of Your Life as an encore, which was totally unexpected and completely awesome, as well as an extra few seconds for each of the ensemble to shine.
So, in conclusion. Yay!
