AMERICAN IDIOT Redux

One of my side hobbies lately is finding old novels and plays that are the sources for famous musicals, and if these sources are out of print, I put them back in print, with a little help from Amazon. One current project is the 1835 play A Day Well Spent, which went through several adaptations over the years and finally became Hello, Dolly!

For these reprint projects, I add an essay about the piece and its adaptations. Right now, I'm reading a lot about Thornton Wilder, one of our greatest playwrights and novelists. He wrote, among many others, Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and The Matchmaker. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, and he's the only person ever to win a Pulitzer for Fiction and also for Drama.

To my surprise, what I'm finding in Wilder's writing about theatre, is so relevant to American Idiot, which we New Liners are working on right now. It's such an expressionistic piece of musical theatre, never really pretending to reality, but working in a heightened, simpler, poetic world, to express truths about reality. I never would have thought about it before, but director Michael Mayer staged American Idiot very much in the style of Our Town. There's virtually no physical reality, but there's a deep vein of powerfully real emotions and truths.

Remember what George tells his mother in Sunday in the Park with George?

Pretty isn't beautiful, Mother.
Pretty is what changes.
What the eye arranges is what is beautiful.

"Pretty" is only a surface quality, while beautiful goes deeper, involving the mind and emotions, maybe even changing the viewer in some way. “Pretty,” representing the actual state of things, is changeable. “Beautiful,” representing the ideal state of things does not change. The ideal always remains the same because it is never realized and therefore can't fade or age. George changes what is pretty when he draws it, but once he paints it, it no longer changes. It is frozen in time.

It's about what's true and what's truthful. They're not the same. A lie can reveal a larger truth.

This quote is from Thornton Wilder's preface to his published Our Town script.

The theater longs to represent the symbols of things, not the things themselves. All the lies it tells – the lie that that young lady is Caesar’s wife; the lie that people can go through life talking in blank verse; the lie that that man just killed that man – all those lies enhance the one truth that is there – the truth that dictated the story, the myth. The theater asks for as many conventions as possible. A convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, an accepted untruth. When the theater pretends to give the real thing in canvas and wood and metal it loses something of the realer thing which is its true business.

In 2016, when we produced American Idiot last time, I started my first blog post about the show, writing, "America is a very angry place right now." Who knew that nothing much would have changed eight years later?

I'm not the lead director for this show. New Line's associate artistic director Chris Moore is directing and I'll be by his side. But not having to worry about staging and other details, it's allowed me to sit back and think about the show, the impulses that created the album in 2004, the impulses that led to the Broadway musical in 2010, the impulses that made us produce the show in 2016, and what it means today in 2024.

That first line of the show is such an assault and now it's packed with even more meaning than ever before -- "Don't wanna be an American Idiot!" The audience will hear that differently than they did the last time we did the show, or when they first heard those words in 2004.

It's more proof of the Fiddler on the Roof Rule -- the more specific the details are, the more universal the story will feel. The rule definitely applies here. American Idiot is very much about George W. Bush and his two wars, but it's also -- every second of it -- about right here and now.

And I'm just as excited to share this amazing show with you as I was last time. If you'd like to check out my blog posts about the show from 2016...

American Idiot

The Song of Rage and Love

We're Not the Ones Meant to Follow

The Rest of Our Lives

Throw Up Your Arms

She Gets So Sick of Crying

This Sensation's Overwhelming

It's Something Unpredictable

For What It's Worth

And In the Darkest Night

Come join us for the return of this brilliant piece of political theatre. American Idiot runs Sept. 12 to Oct. 5 at the Marcelle Theater in the Grand Center Arts District. Sept. 12 is a preview, and there is no performance on Sept. 14.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.