Last night at the St. James Theater, I saw the relatively new Broadway musical “American Idiot,” developed from the 2004 album of the same name by the punk band Green Day. (Just recently it won a Grammy award for “Best Musical Show Album.”) The lead singer of Green Day, Billie Joe Armstrong, who wrote the book for the show, played “St. Jimmy,” and there seemed to be a strong showing of Green Day fans in the audience. This was one of the most youthful Broadway audiences I’ve ever seen, and this was the first Broadway musical I’ve attended where some audience members were singing along with several of the songs (although a bit quietly), which I found both sweet and distracting. One of the few punk gestures of noncomformity to be found.

Here is a short introduction to the musical, with the opening number and some commentary from the director Michael Mayer and from Armstrong.

I don’t want to give away too much of the details of the plot for those who might yet see it (although if you want a barebones overview, check out the show’s Wiki page here). But this show confirmed for me that the overlay of rock and theology is far from dead in popular culture; this rock musical was replete with religious imagery, gesture, and

invocation. It traces the lives of three young men in the early 21st century United States who find the sad familial rituals and dulling TV-driven couch life of their suburban town too much to bear. They want to form a rock band and be done with it all. Far from being a punk invention, this is an old rock story. (I wrote here about the power of the venerable Rush tune “Subdivisions” and its cover by musician Jacob Moon.) The youthful flight from the American suburbs is also a story (among other things) of race and class, neither of which get much honest dealing (even in Broadway musical terms) in “American Idiot,” which I will leave to experts in punk to say whether this reproduces or betrays (or both) the lived dynamics of punk in this country. But the three friends end up taking different routes to escape: one, by non-escape (because he ends up staying home with his pregnant girlfriend, Heather), another by joining the military and being shipped off to Iraq, and a third by finding urban love (with an outstanding Rebecca Naomi Jones, formerly of Passing Strange, as the unfortunately named “Whatshername”) and drugs, not necessarily in that order. The musical checks in on all three (whose names are Johnny, Tunny, and Will) as they make their way through love and war to try to find something real outside suburbia. But what does get a fair amount of play in this musical is religion.

Where and how one finds that religion is going to be contentious, and I want to keep this post relatively brief. But one of the main characters is named St. Jimmy (a marquee role played by Armstrong in recent performances, also played by Melissa Etheridge a few weeks ago, and soon to be played by Davey Havok of AFI and no doubt many other swashbuckling and devious personae to come). St. Jimmy is more or less an angel/demon/daimon of concupiscence, Johnny’s gateway to drug use and his siren into an addictive spiral. Angel wings projected on the wall during one of his songs suggest his divine-ish identity. Meantime, an image of a cross on a television is surrounded by porn shops, and Johnny is celebrated as the “Jesus of Suburbia” (the punk Nazareth — “Can anything good come of it?” as John 1:46 in the Christian scriptures wonders), taking on both its failings and its redemption. Despite the fact that Christian symbols are often invoked, I could not find much going on in that regard beyond a mere battery of religious references deployed playfully in a show full of “shock and awe” about growing up under “shock and awe.”

Apart from the explicit Christian images that recur regularly, the more interesting pieces of theological traffic for me were: (1) the question of the real identity of St. Jimmy, which, the play reveals, is some kind of narcissistic theological fantasy of Johnny — and for a brief moment in “American Idiot” there was a glimmer of a challenge to a theology of saintliness but no more than a gesture toward a criticism of the invention of “saints”; (2) Tunny’s fantasy/hallucination, as a wounded soldier stuck in his hospital gurney, about a Muslim woman (played by Christian Sajous), in full burqa, descending from heaven. I wish, wish, wish they had done more with this, which is the most surprising scene in the entire musical. Instead (as too often happens with “Whatshername”), she disrobes and we get more sexy dancing. One need not be against sexy dancing (cue famous Spinal Tap scene) to want fuller characters and, come on, in the spirit of punk, more freedom with these tired codes. And therein, frequently enough, more satisfying revelation. (See Spring Awakening or Passing Strange, for example.)

Still, an evening with “American Idiot” was confirmation that rock and religion are not only far from separating, they are rarely far from each other.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

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