Tag Archives: Green Day

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

American Idiot at The Paramount is a Holiday for Green Day Fans

Van Hughes (Johnny), Joshua Kobak (St. Jimmy) and the company of AMERICAN IDIOT (Photo: Doug Hamilton)

The sons (and daughters) of rage and love were in the audience and onstage for the opening of Green Day’s American Idiot, a musical based on the band’s 2004 iconic album (tickets now through June 10 at the Paramount Theatre). For fans of the album, this rock musical taps into the angst-fueled vibe of the recording and brings it to life in an engaging, raucous stage show.

American Idiot is more Tommy than We Will Rock You, the “jukebox” musical cobbled together from Queen songs. The album holds together as the rock opera that Green Day intended it to be, and the musical version brings the characters of The Jesus of Suburbia, St. Jimmy, and Whatsername together in a story of disaffection, anger, loneliness, and redemption.

What this musical–wisely–decides not to do is define its characters or the storyline too clearly. It gives you just enough to hold together while allowing you to play out the story that you always had in your head from listening to the album. It lets the musical and the story mean whatever you want it to mean. It stays potentially personal to each audience member.

Looking oddly like the love child of Green Day frontman Billy Joe Armstrong and drummer Tre Cool, Van Hughes plays the lead character of Johnny with an appropriate ferocity. He’s a good rock singer and captures the feel of the original songs while still keeping the sound in a somewhat musical theatre-ish context. He starts the show off in your face with the title song (“American Idiot”), with middle finger blazing in salute to the suburban teenager. As an actor, he shows his range as a goes from guns blazing to a soft and heartfelt “Wake Me Up When September Ends.”

His alter-ego/frenemy/enabler, St. Jimmy, is played/sung with Alan Cumming-like malevolence by Joshua Kobak. He is clearly having fun in the role that Billy Joe played for a while on Broadway, announcing his brand with “St. Jimmy.” It’s always more fun to play the bad guy. Vocally, he was one of the strongest rock singers in the cast. Surprisingly, the vocals overall were uneven, with Johnny’s mate Tunny (Scott J. Campbell) on the other end of the spectrum with pitch issues throughout.

Whatsername enters in “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” with a Steven Tyler-like “Dream On” wail. Gabrielle McClinton plays her with a raw sexuality and vulnerability.

The really excellent band stays on stage throughout the show, except when the songs go acoustic on the guitar played by anyone (and at the end, everyone) in the cast. The gritty unit set features video screens that flash lyrics, venue indicators (“We’re now at a 7-11”), EKG signals and (frequently) the f-word to keep the punk-y, street cred thing going.

Listening to the comments from the young teen boys near me as we left the theatre–many of whom are attending their first live musical theatre performance–it’s clear they had the time of their lives.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

NOFX Packs the King Cat Tonight

If the mountains of snow and the gale-force winds last week made you forget that NOFX is in town tonight, here’s hoping you already scored your tickets. The band’s show at the King Cat Theater sold out.

Not that that’s much of a surprise. NOFX have spent almost thirty years building up a sizeable grass-roots following. And while they’re way too willfully goofy and unpretentious to cop to it, the Cali punk quartet’s stuck around long enough to become elder statesmen to acts like Rancid and Green Day (granted, NOFX are elder statesmen whose repertoire includes a 32-second song called “I Gotta Pee,” but still…). The band’s core membership–bassist/screamer Fat Mike, drummer Eric “Smelly” Sandin, and guitarist Eric Melvin–began playing together way back in 1985, and they’ve spent the ensuing years honing their variety of catchy, sometimes silly, and often politically-incorrect punk to a tight (but always fun) sheen.

Like a lot of elder statesmen, NOFX didn’t quite hit the cash-cow heights of some of the bands they influenced. Fat Mike and company defiantly stayed on indie labels and avoided the music industry dog-and-pony show despite a lot of major-label interest back in the mid-1990’s. Their penchant for integrating snickers with slamdancing seemed like a combination that’d break ’em big, but their knack for not keeping their mouths shut probably didn’t endear them to the suits running the corporate megaliths. A few years back they stirred things up on Conan O’Brien’s NBC talk show with some explicit Bush-bashing, and they’ve managed to deliver some persuasive protest punk in between the songs about coke-addled clowns and Tegan and Sara.

They’ve reportedly got a new full-length due out later this year, so expect some new tunes intermingled with live standards like “You Drink, You Drive, You Spill” and “Don’t Call Me White.” Rest assured, it’ll all delivered with snot-nosed feistiness that should make this evening’s King Cat crowd a bunch of justifiably happy campers.