Green Day's Rock Opera Hits the Stage

Green Day’s multiplatinum album American Idiot is taking the stage as a 75-minute rock opera that will “challenge the very definitions of punk, theater, and musical,” writes David Downs in the East Bay Express. A 19-member cast will showcase a “Fight Club-esque story of self-discovery through death and destruction,” using only the lyrics from the album.

A live band will accompany the actors in the show, directed by Tony-award winner Michael Mayer, a huge fan of the album. “I was really dazzled by it: the political agenda, the urgency of the message, and the poetry really of both the music and the lyrics,” he says. He met with Green Day, whose singer, Billie Joe Armstrong, was wowed by Mayer’s work—and the show was written in six weeks. (More Green Day stories.)