„American Idiot,“ the Green Day musical, is a Deaf West Theatre and Center Theatre Group co-production performed jointly in spoken English and American Sign Language with both hearing and Deaf actors.
“American Idiot,” the Green Day musical that opened Wednesday at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum, begins with visuals of Donald Trump.
It’s a fitting start to director Snehal Desai’s updated staging of the 2010 Tony-winning musical, here a Deaf West Theatre and Center Theatre Group co-production performed jointly in spoken English and American Sign Language with both hearing and Deaf actors. A musical call to arms adapting Green Day’s seminal 2004 concept album of the same name – itself a Grammy-winning, post-9/11 indoctrination of the Bush years – the musical seethes with a rousing, underbelly rage that feels as appropriate today as it did 15 or 20 years ago. Projections of the Republican presidential nominee lead frantic snippets of our 24-hour news cycle in those opening moments, slapping the audience awake with a literal media overload before the production’s ensemble chants over the title song’s opening riffs: “Don’t wanna be an American idiot / Don’t want a nation under the new media.”
And it’s safe to say Donald Trump has no fan in Green Day.
The veteran punk rock outfit hilariously came under fire earlier this year when, while performing on “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” frontman Billie Joe Armstrong had words for the former president, changing the lyrics to their 2004 anthem “American Idiot” to say he’s not “part of the MAGA agenda.”
“Hilariously” because, well, what else did conservative pundits expect from a band who’s always rocked with anti-establishment, anti-authority and often anti-Republican rhetoric? Their catalog, and especially “American Idiot,” has long been a middle finger to a system that benefits the few at the expense of the many.
