Broadway Idiot, which documents the adaptation of Green Day’s acclaimed album American Idiot into a stage musical, tries to gin up some tension by proposing a divide between rock and legitimate theater that hasn’t really existed for 20 years. Ever since The Who’s Tommy took Broadway by storm in April 1993, producers have been trying to recycle boomer musical staples into money-minting shows, and the Green Day album, which reaches back to both the Who and the Clash, is the most palatable brand of punk rock around. The show’s director, Michael Mayer, whose talking-head interviews function as a sort of hectoring narration, hastens to set up the moment when Billie Joe Armstrong, the band’s songwriter and front man, will first hear the new arrangements of his tunes. The band members arrive at the rehearsal studio and sit in folding chairs as the cast perform an angelic choral arrangement of the ballad “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” A camera pushes into Armstrong’s face to capture his reaction, and he has the poise to oblige them without surrending the rolling tear Mayer probably wanted.
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Directed by Doug Hamilton 81 min. Music Box 3733 N. Southport 773-871-6604musicboxtheatre.com
