American Idiot

This afternoon Chrissi and I headed into London to catch the American Idiot musical, based on the music (and aforementioned album) of Green Day. As one of my favourite bands I was intrigued as to how their songs would be translated into a musical - while there is now an increasing number of rock-musicals (Rock of Ages and We Will Rock You to name but two), it's still not the most natural translation into a musical.

American Idiot was particularly difficult because the album it's based on was very much a concept album, at least two-thirds of the way to being a rock opera in itself. Some of its inspirations were from musicals - so to take that back and forth in formats struggles in the translation.

For the first part of the show, as they went through the album songs in sequence - with a little fleshing out of characters but not hugely - it felt almost like a concert with added choreography. There wasn't a musical in the form of songs interspersed with plot - and as the songs were already in this structure and there was less work to 'fit' a discography into a musical format around a story, the majority of the plot was told through songs, more of a rock-opera.

It did develop well and it was entertaining - but I'm still not quite sure that it works. The paradox is, as I pointed out to Chrissi, that their best tracks are from their earlier albums, while the most suitable songs for the musical were from their latest albums (3-4 songs from 21st Century Breakdown were added to the American Idiot tracks). This was clearly proved with the strength of the closing, post-finale song, the supreme Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) which was the by far outstanding effort.

It was a good afternoon's entertainment all being said, however - I'd recommend you to have a look for yourself, but as this was the last day it was playing in London you might struggle to do so!