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Sunday Theater
May. 14th, 2013 10:59 amA friend of ours is the company manager for a road production of "American Idiot" and since they were playing in Baltimore this past weekend, we drove up to see the show.
Well.
I knew nothing of the show, the music or its background. For most theater I've attended these past few years, I've found that's the nearest I can come to a winning strategy as it spares me both the dread of the event to come and offers the chance of an element of surprise.
I'll also say up front, I'm not a fan of the fad of taking a bunch of popular songs, creating some sort of narrative to vaguely link them and presenting it as a musical extravaganza --I'm looking at you, "Mama Mia!" and "Moving On". "American Idiot" is more of the rock opera format of "The Who's Tommy" but it suffers from the same sort of flaws. When you start with the songs first and then add a plot or narrative, you're doomed to have characters who can't even aspire to be two-dimensional: characters are frozen in musical amber before they even get proper name in the script, trapped by whatever meaning, symbology, nuance and emotional baggage the writer already wrote into the album's liner notes and original promotional materials. Worse yet, recycling the songs years after initial release into a show means one also has to fight whatever emotional attachment the audience is bringing with them; a director might leverage that nostalgia, playing along with those expectations, but that just reinforces the rote predictability I dread.
In any case, "American Idiot" was a style of musical of which I'm not fond. Enough said on that front.
Sadly, I can't say much more about it. I'm not familiar with the music of "Green Day": while a few bars of melody occasionally sounded familiar, I didn't know it at all. That novelty could have rescued it for me, but it was so damn loud that I couldn't discern nearly all of the lyrics. Out of 24 songs (more or less), there were only four brief instances where the vocals weren't drowned out by electric guitars. Those brief moments of vocals with acoustic guitar accompaniments were quite nice but not enough to help me make sense of the plot: it just emphasized the characters' angst-of-the-moment which I had already figured out from other visual elements.
Here's the overall plot:
Three stoners chafe against society. Why? Dunno.
One stays home with his pregnant girlfriend, the other two hit the road for a better life. Why? Dunno.
Homie fights with the girlfriend and doesn't bond with new baby. Why? Dunno.
One guy joins the military. Why? Dunno.
He loses a leg in battle, his nurse becomes his girlfriend and he returns home. Why? Dunno.
The remaining guy gets stoned even more, has a girlfriend, realizes he's a mess, cleans up (more or less) and returns home only marginally wiser than when he left but hey, it's progress, right?
And they lived stoned ever after.
No, really, there's no more plot than that. Did any of the characters have any sort of internal conflict or even self-awareness of their decisions? We know nothing about the women in their lives around which all of their would-be decisions are being made, save for one song by Knocked-up Girl but I could only understand the first 25% of her song before she was drowned out by electric guitars. Do the women even have names?
I'm going to rename it "Stoners Falling Blindly into Bad Situations".
In all, I was grateful it was only a 90 minute show with no intermission and that the tickets were free. I was more intrigued by the hot guitarist in the band on stage left than performance. When the orchestra/band is more interesting than the show they're playing, there's a problem.
The part I really don't understand however is the standing ovation they got when the show finished and the curtain fell. Really? I can understand applauding for a competent execution, but a standing ovation for... that? My best theory is that the rest of the audience were season ticket holders and suddenly overcome with the theatrical equivalent of Stockholm syndrome: I paid for this so dammit I'm going to like it no matter how much my ears bleed.
Well.
I knew nothing of the show, the music or its background. For most theater I've attended these past few years, I've found that's the nearest I can come to a winning strategy as it spares me both the dread of the event to come and offers the chance of an element of surprise.
I'll also say up front, I'm not a fan of the fad of taking a bunch of popular songs, creating some sort of narrative to vaguely link them and presenting it as a musical extravaganza --I'm looking at you, "Mama Mia!" and "Moving On". "American Idiot" is more of the rock opera format of "The Who's Tommy" but it suffers from the same sort of flaws. When you start with the songs first and then add a plot or narrative, you're doomed to have characters who can't even aspire to be two-dimensional: characters are frozen in musical amber before they even get proper name in the script, trapped by whatever meaning, symbology, nuance and emotional baggage the writer already wrote into the album's liner notes and original promotional materials. Worse yet, recycling the songs years after initial release into a show means one also has to fight whatever emotional attachment the audience is bringing with them; a director might leverage that nostalgia, playing along with those expectations, but that just reinforces the rote predictability I dread.
In any case, "American Idiot" was a style of musical of which I'm not fond. Enough said on that front.
Sadly, I can't say much more about it. I'm not familiar with the music of "Green Day": while a few bars of melody occasionally sounded familiar, I didn't know it at all. That novelty could have rescued it for me, but it was so damn loud that I couldn't discern nearly all of the lyrics. Out of 24 songs (more or less), there were only four brief instances where the vocals weren't drowned out by electric guitars. Those brief moments of vocals with acoustic guitar accompaniments were quite nice but not enough to help me make sense of the plot: it just emphasized the characters' angst-of-the-moment which I had already figured out from other visual elements.
Here's the overall plot:
Three stoners chafe against society. Why? Dunno.
One stays home with his pregnant girlfriend, the other two hit the road for a better life. Why? Dunno.
Homie fights with the girlfriend and doesn't bond with new baby. Why? Dunno.
One guy joins the military. Why? Dunno.
He loses a leg in battle, his nurse becomes his girlfriend and he returns home. Why? Dunno.
The remaining guy gets stoned even more, has a girlfriend, realizes he's a mess, cleans up (more or less) and returns home only marginally wiser than when he left but hey, it's progress, right?
And they lived stoned ever after.
No, really, there's no more plot than that. Did any of the characters have any sort of internal conflict or even self-awareness of their decisions? We know nothing about the women in their lives around which all of their would-be decisions are being made, save for one song by Knocked-up Girl but I could only understand the first 25% of her song before she was drowned out by electric guitars. Do the women even have names?
I'm going to rename it "Stoners Falling Blindly into Bad Situations".
In all, I was grateful it was only a 90 minute show with no intermission and that the tickets were free. I was more intrigued by the hot guitarist in the band on stage left than performance. When the orchestra/band is more interesting than the show they're playing, there's a problem.
The part I really don't understand however is the standing ovation they got when the show finished and the curtain fell. Really? I can understand applauding for a competent execution, but a standing ovation for... that? My best theory is that the rest of the audience were season ticket holders and suddenly overcome with the theatrical equivalent of Stockholm syndrome: I paid for this so dammit I'm going to like it no matter how much my ears bleed.
