Green Day's American Idiot a tough sell on Broadway
7 / 10
Although the original concept album is reasonably cohesive, it's a thin premise on which to base a musical, and the show's book, by the band's Billie Joe Armstrong and director Michael Mayer, doesn't manage to flesh it out sufficiently. Telling its story largely through music and movement with only a smattering of dialogue, 'Idiot' never manages to make us care about the fate of its thinly drawn characters. Still, there's a lot of passion onstage, and Mayer has provided the sort of propulsive staging that helps put the material over.
