Expert answer:I need to review to critics and give my opinions.
Solved by verified expert:You will post on the reaction you had about the two reviews that you read. You will be critiquing the critics. I will attach the two reviews So
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the role of a critic. Is it where to spend your money? What to see?
Do you let them tell you what is good or bad? Are critics telling you
about all the symbolism you missed, or how the piece is genius but only
experts will get it, or how derivative this work is when compared to
Russian-Absurdist-Dadaist-Postmodern
trends? Do you understand what the critic is trying to say? Let me
know what you think critics are for, and then tell me what you thought
of the two Greenday reviews
you read. After you have told me what you thought of the reviews, you
will then tell me WHY you have that opinion of the reviews. You will
support your thesis statement with an objective view of your point of
view. You will observe, analyze and then comment on a review, then do
the same thing to yourself. You
will be graded on your ability to state your point of view – and then
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Review by Tulis McCall (21 Apr 2010)
There is a reason that reviewers go to see a show a few
days before it opens – unlike the good old days when they
came to opening night and had to produce a review within a
few hours. I’m not referring to scheduling conflicts here.
I’m referring to the “stick to your ribs” effect. How long
does the show stay with you after you leave the theatre?
That’s what I’m referring to.
American Idiot didn’t make it to the curb.
And it’s the oddest thing, because #1) the audience was
primed for this show. We really wanted it to be a success.
You could feel it in the house. #2) I was entertained by
this tale of three young men, Johnny (John Gallagher, Jr.),
Will (Michael Esper), and Tunny (Stark Sands) who are stuck
in the wheel-in-a-cage that is their lives. But I’m
entertained by people talking about their lives anyway. #3)
These three men have stage presence and can tell a story.
American Idiot begins with promise on a startling set by
Christine Jones replete with 30 or so TV screens on which
are flashed images of what passes for reality. And these
kids don’t like what they are seeing. They are filled with
angst and frustration and hormones. They are, in a word,
normal.
Johnny, Will and Tunny decide to chuck it all and blow
town, but before they can Will discovers that his woman is
going to have a baby. He stays behind to take care of his
new family.
Actually the title of this show might be The Couch on the
Corner because Esper never leaves his position on the
downstage couch throughout the evening. While Johnny falls
in love with Whatshername (Rebecca Naomi Jones), and then
falls in love with drugs – Will is on the couch singing
along with it all. When Tunny joins the Army and loses his
heart to The Extraordinary Girl (Christina Sajous), Will
never budges. Maybe it’s the authors’ way of showing us
that the man who stays home is so grounded that he
ultimately pulls the others back into his orbit.
Michael Mayer (director of Spring Awakening) conceived the
idea for this production after hearing Green Day’s CD
American Idiot. He wanted to make an expanded rock opera
out of what was already a rock opera. It’s hard to tell
what got expanded here, because all we ever find out about
these guys is that they are struggling. Yawn. After awhile
an audience needs more than that – we need a story to reach
out and get us where it matters. The danger with this kind
of rock is that it is an art form that depends on its
followers to storm the stage. It doesn’t have to reach at
all. It just has to be loud enough to override the roar of
hormones in full flight.
Part of the problem may also be that the music itself is
already dated. American Idiot came out in 2004 when
conservative talk radio was having a hoo-rah and Bush was
coasting into a second term. The global condition has
changed, and the generation of “instant everything” has
changed with it. This music has become what it resisted.
Hoisted by their own petard, as it were.
Look, there really are no new stories. Aristotle pretty
much took care of that. There is love, power struggles, and
life/death. So the fact that there is nothing new in this
production is no big deal. What is a big deal is that the
nothing new is being told in a kind of bland way that is
way, way, way loud, mostly unintelligible, and has only
flickers of inventiveness.
There are a few dazzling scenes – one where two lovers
perform a sort of ballet while tied together with the
rubber tubing that addicts use to tie off an artery, and
another that features two other lovers in some nifty aerial
moves. The set also has one glorious turn as a city in
revolve. But these moments’ glow only point out the lack of
same elsewhere.
In his last song, Johnny sings about the gal that got away
(Reminiscent of What’s Her Name by John Lee Hooker
…Whatshername?, I thought I knew her, Whatshername? What
happened to her? I don’t now why I’ll never forget
Whatshername….
Johnny:And that was that.Or so it seemed.Is this the endOr
the beginning?All I know is,She was right.I am an idiot.
It’s even on my birth certificate.In so many words.
This is my rageThis is my loveThis is my townThis is my
cityThis is my life
Yep. So it is, which means we are all back pretty much
where we started with not a lot to show for it.
And THEN after all the yelling and storming and struggle,
the entire cast reappears, right after the curtain call,
playing acoustic guitars and singing an anthem that wishes
us a happy life, or evening or something. After all the
angst and anger, the coda is a :-).
Go figure.
http://www.newyorktheatreguide.com/reviews/americanidiot10.htm
Stomping Onto Broadway With a Punk Temper Tantrum
By Charles Isherwood April 20, 2010
Rage and love, those consuming emotions felt with a
particularly acute pang in youth, all but burn up the stage
in “American Idiot,” the thrillingly raucous and gorgeously
wrought Broadway musical adapted from the blockbuster poppunk album by Green Day.
Pop on Broadway, sure. But punk? Yes, indeed, and served
straight up, with each sneering lyric and snarling riff in
place. A stately old pile steps from the tourist-clogged
Times Square might seem a strange place for the music of
Green Day, and for theater this blunt, bold and aggressive
in its attitude. Not to mention loud. But from the moment
the curtain rises on a panorama of baleful youngsters at
the venerable St. James Theater, where the show opened on
Tuesday night, it’s clear that these kids are going to make
themselves at home, even if it means tearing up the place
in the process.
Which they do, figuratively speaking. “American Idiot,”
directed by Michael Mayer and performed with galvanizing
intensity by a terrific cast, detonates a fierce aesthetic
charge in this ho-hum Broadway season. A pulsating portrait
of wasted youth that invokes all the standard genre
conventions — bring on the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll,
please! — only to transcend them through the power of its
music and the artistry of its execution, the show is as
invigorating and ultimately as moving as anything I’ve seen
on Broadway this season. Or maybe for a few seasons past.
Burning with rage and love, and knowing how and when to
express them, are two different things, of course. The
young men we meet in the first minutes of “American Idiot”
are too callow and sullen and restless — too young,
basically — to channel their emotions constructively. The
show opens with a glorious 20-minute temper tantrum kicked
off by the title song.
“Don’t want to be an American idiot!” shouts one of the
gang. The song’s signature electric guitar riff slashes
through the air, echoing the testy challenge of the cry. A
sharp eight-piece band, led by the conductor Carmel Dean,
is arrayed around the stage, providing a sonic frame for
the action. The simple but spectacular set, designed by
Christine Jones, suggests an epically
looming walls papered in punk posters
television screens, on which frenzied
flicker throughout the show. (They’re
Darrel Maloney.)
scaled dive club, its
and pimpled by
video collages
the witty work of
Who’s the American idiot being referred to? Well, as that
curtain slowly rose, we heard the familiar voice of George
W. Bush break through a haze of television chatter: “Either
you are with us, or with the terrorists.” That kind of talk
could bring out the heedless rebel in any kid, particularly
one who is already feeling itchy at the lack of prospects
in his dreary suburban burg.
But while “American Idiot” is nominally a portrait of
youthful malaise of a particular era — the album dates from
2004, the midpoint of the Bush years, and the show is set
in “the recent past” — its depiction of the crisis of postadolescence is essentially timeless. Teenagers eager for
their lives to begin, desperate to slough off their old
selves and escape boredom through pure sensation, will
probably always be making the same kinds of mistakes,
taking the same wrong turns on the road to self-discovery.
“American Idiot” is a true rock opera, almost exclusively
using the music of Green Day and the lyrics of its kohleyed frontman, Billie Joe Armstrong, to tell its story.
(The score comprises the whole of the title album as well
as several songs from the band’s most recent release, “21st
Century Breakdown.”) The book, by Mr. Armstrong and Mr.
Mayer, consists only of a series of brief, snarky
dispatches sent home by the central character, Johnny,
played with squirmy intensity by the immensely gifted John
Gallagher Jr. (“Spring Awakening,” “Rabbit Hole”).
“I held up my local convenience store to get a bus ticket,”
Johnny says with a smirk as he and a pal head out of town.
“Actually I stole the money from my mom’s dresser.”
Beat.
“Actually she lent me the cash.”
Such is the sheepish fate of a would-be rebel today. But at
least Johnny and his buddy Tunny (Stark Sands) do manage to
escape deadly suburbia for the lively city, bringing along
just their guitars and the anomie and apathy that are the
bread and butter of teenage attitudinizing the world over.
(“I don’t care if you don’t care,” a telling lyric, could
be their motto.)
The friend they meant to bring along, Will (Michael Esper),
was forced to stay home when he discovered that his
girlfriend (Mary Faber) was pregnant. Lost and lonely, and
far from ready for the responsibilities of fatherhood, he
sinks into the couch, beer in one hand and bong in the
other, as his friends set off for adventure.
Beneath the swagger of indifference, of course, are
anxiety, fear and insecurity, which Mr. Gallagher, Mr.
Esper and Mr. Sands transmit with aching clarity in the
show’s more reflective songs, like the hit “Boulevard of
Broken Dreams” or the lilting anthem “Are We the Waiting.”
The city turns out to be just a bigger version of the place
Johnny and Tunny left behind, a “land of make believe that
don’t believe in me.” The boys discover that while a
fractious 21st-century America may not offer any easy paths
to fulfillment, the deeper problem is that they don’t know
how to believe in themselves.
Johnny strolls the lonely streets with his guitar, vaguely
yearning for love and achievement. He eventually hooks up
with a girl (a vivid Rebecca Naomi Jones) but falls more
powerfully under the spell of an androgynous goth drug
pusher, St. Jimmy, played with mesmerizing vitality and
piercing vocalism by Tony Vincent. Tunny mostly stays in
bed, clicker affixed to his right hand, dangerously
susceptible to a pageant of propaganda about military
heroism on the tube, set to the song “Favorite Son.” By the
time the song’s over, he’s enlisted and off to Iraq.
In both plotting and its emotional palette, “American
Idiot” is drawn in brash, primary-colored strokes, maybe
too crudely for those looking for specifics of character
rather than cultural archetypes. But operas — rock or
classical — often trade in archetypes, and the actors flesh
out their characters’ journeys through their heartfelt
interpretations of the songs, with the help of Mr. Mayer’s
poetic direction and the restless, convulsive choreography
of Steven Hoggett (“Black Watch”), which exults in both the
grace and the awkwardness of energy-generating young
metabolisms.
Line by line, a skeptic could fault Mr. Armstrong’s lyrics
for their occasional glibness or grandiosity. That’s to be
expected, too: rock music exploits heightened emotion and
truisms that can fit neatly into a memorable chorus. The
songs are precisely as articulate — and inarticulate — as
the characters are, reflecting the moment in youth when
many of us feel that pop music has more to say about us
than we have to say for ourselves. (And, really, have you
ever worked your way through a canonical Italian opera
libretto, line by line?)
In any case the music is thrilling: charged with urgency,
rich in memorable melody and propulsive rhythms that
sometimes evolve midsong. The orchestrations by Tom Kitt
(the composer of “Next to Normal”) move from lean and mean
to lush, befitting the tone of each number. Even if you are
unfamiliar with Green Day’s music, you are more likely to
emerge from this show humming one of the guitar riffs than
you are to find a tune from “The Addams Family” tickling
your memory.
But the emotion charge that the show generates is as
memorable as the music. “American Idiot” jolts you right
back to the dizzying roller coaster of young adulthood,
that turbulent time when ecstasy and misery almost seem
interchangeable states, flip sides of the coin of
exaltation. It captures with a piercing intensity that
moment in life when everything seems possible, and nothing
seems worth doing, or maybe it’s the other way around.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/theater/reviews/21idiot.html?_r=2
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