Green Day concert spectacle overwhelms ‘American Idiot’ story

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Updated: March 10, 2012 8:20AM

Broadway has suffered from arena envy ever since it was thumped on the head by the British invasion a good half century ago. It still hasn’t recovered. And so what we’ve gotten over the decades has been an endless series of increasingly amped-up spectacles (some more interesting and artful than others) in which everybody assumes a full-frontal, super-hyped, sex-drugs-and-rock and roll, in-your-face performance style — one that requires next to no real human interaction (but a whole lot of angry attitude) while erupting in a volcano of noise and visual stimulation.

As the latest example I give you “American Idiot,” now at the Oriental Theatre. The show has been shaped from the 2004 album by Green Day, the band whose vocalist/guitarist, Billie Joe Armstrong, wrote most of the lyrics and shares billing with director Michael Mayer (of “Spring Awakening” fame) for its book.

That book is barely an outline, with maybe two sentences spoken during the course of the show’s 100 minutes of sung-through action. And the characters never emerge as anything more than “types” as opposed to real people — continually singing AT the audience rather than communicating with each other. It’s hard to feel much of anything here except the pulse of the music, and if you’re coming for a rock concert you won’t be disappointed. Green Day’s songs are volatile and seductive, with several lovely ballads briefly interrupting the relentless high-voltage pounding (and the show’s nearly blinding, dangerously retina-burning lighting by Kevin Adams). The onstage band, led by music director Jared Stein, is hot. And the voices of the muscular cast are powerful.

But frankly, it’s hard to care about the plight of the three disaffected, willfully moronic, obscenity-spewing, working-class guys who are lost in post-high school malaise here — especially Johnny (Van Hughes), the self-declared loser at the center of the action who moves from suburbia to the big city, goes to the devil in the form of an alter ego, St. Jimmy (Joshua Kobak) and gets himself and his rebel girlfriend (Gabrielle McClinton) hooked on heroin.

One of Johnny’s pals, Will (Jake Epstein), goes nowhere. He stays home with Heather (Leslie McDonel), the girl he has gotten pregnant, and both end up feeling trapped and angry. Another friend, Tunny (Scott J. Campbell), goes to the city with Johnny, acts on a macho impulse and joins the army (it’s unclear whether the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks happen before or after he does this) and ends up losing a leg but becoming a patriot. THIS would have been a story well-worth developing, but all we get is a stunning aerial ballet in which the woman of Tunny’s dreams (played at Tuesday’s opening by Krystina Alabado) appears first as a harem girl and then as a devoted nurse. (The airborne pas de deux, as well as all the bang-your-fists choreography, is the work of Steven Hoggett, who also was involved with the National Theatre of Scotland’s exceptional “Black Watch.”)

Christine Jones’ set is a jungle of wheel-driven scaffolding impregnated with dozens of flat screen televisions that flash the usual hash of seriously bad news and pure garbage, all overlaid with projections. There is plenty of sound and fury here, but it doesn’t signify much. And “American Idiot” ends up feeling like little more than a critique of America that just compounds the idiocy.