Green Day's American Idiot UK Tour
In August 1998 I watched Green Day play at Rock City touring their Nimrod album. I was a teenager and they were one of the most exciting new(ish) bands on the planet. Basketcase was a Thursday night anthem for everyone who attended the Rock City club nights in the nineties and we all moshed out and spilled drinks over each other to their soundtrack.
Fast forward a couple of decades and the Green Day experience has moved two minutes across the road to the Theatre Royal. Geographically this is nothing, but culturally it’s a canyon. In those two decades they’ve gone from playing in sticky floored nightclubs to curating a musical of their tunes at the biggest theatres around the country. Counterculture has become culture in the most obvious way.
So I entered the theatre with a little trepidation. After all the two billed cast members were an easy listening rock star (Newton Faulkner) and a 2011 X-Factor finalist (Amelia Lilly). It hardly sounds very 'punk' does it? Would this play, like a John Lydon butter advert, just bury my teenage memories of how great this punk band were and what they meant to me?
Green Day's American Idiot The Musical
I needn’t have worried. From the first song Holiday onwards it’s a really good romp. The set and costumes are impeccable and the cast look like they’re all offcuts from a Tim Burton Batman film – it makes for amazing eye candy.
This play isn’t trying to tell the story of the band, although there are obvious connections to their true lives throughout the story. Instead it tells the story of three teenage friends who are leaving their hometown to explore the world. One of them ends up getting his girlfriend pregnant, one joins the army and one gets into heroin. Along the way they spend a lot of time singing, rocking out with guitars and standing around in their pants.
It’s a bit like watching Grease on Speed. At times some of it might seem a little saccharine, but frankly you’d have to be churlish to not enjoy the spectacle. The rest of the audience seemed to agree too, as when it encored with Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life), the cast went off to a standing ovation.
So almost two decades on it seems Green Day have changed quite a lot. Happily I think I’ve changed too. It's something unpredictable but in the end is right...
American Idiot plays at the Theatre Royal until Saturday 18 June 2016.
Theatre Royal Nottingham website
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