Last night was the opening showing for Green Day’s “American Idiot” musical at Proctors.
The first thing that I learned is that if you at any given point in your life (likely young teens for people my age), learned all of the words to a Green Day album, the lyrics stick with you YEARS later.
I was a big fan of Dookie, which came out in 1994, (which I discovered in maybe 2001), and I can remember telling my friends with conviction that American Idiot, which came out in 2004, was the “better of the newer” Green Day albums as I burned CD copies for a select few… (I think this memory means I’ve always been a bit of a music snob?) However, regardless of how my tastes have changed, I’ve always been impressed by how large the creative body of work from Green Day really is. The discography of Green Day spans eleven studio albums, three live albums, five compilation albums, three video albums, twelve extended plays, three box sets, forty singles, ten promotional singles and thirty-eight music videos. That is a lot of material to work with. I think it is important to take into consideration the massive body of work that Green Day has produced prior to talking about the musical version and to consider that this adaption, as created by Billie Joe Armstrong himself, was simply one direction it could be taken in.