Broadway Idiot

Resyinc by Richard Ari Bona work with HDTV

Why hello there.

How're you doing?

I said heeeey-o!

There's people that like to do things the safe way.

And that's just never been part of my vocabulary.

I don't know, I just, I like to make my own path.

But I never thought I'd end up, you know, doing Broadway.

Billie Joe's a punk rocker from the East Bay,

working class kid.

- Tickets. - It's just me.

I'm from Rockville, Maryland,

upper middle class family and theatre geek.

We have nothing in common.

There's absolutely no reason why this should work.

Again, you can be as cocky as you want to be.

Broadway is such a foreign thing to me,

Stairway to your right, please.

This is crazy.

Tonight Billie Joe Armstrong

will be making his professional theatre debut,

and his Broadway debut at one time.

Fucktime!

The role of Saint Jimmy, usually played by Tony Vincent,

will be played by Billie Joe Armstrong.

I can't act, I can't dance.

Compared to a lot of these people, I can't even sing.

Come on!

I was thinking to myself,

"What the fuck are you doing here?"

American Idiot, the album, exploded on the scene

in those really hideous post 9/11 years.

It was a fierce stance about the state of America.

As a band we really wanted to make

some kind of concept record.

Drawing from like Tommy to Sergeant Pepper.

England!

Mike Dirnt kind of started it off,

and then we all just sort of joined in,

and we were all like, "this could be really great."

To me, bringing American Idiot to Broadway

seemed like a really great idea.

I'm open to big crazy ideas.

But, you know, I mean this album's, it's my baby.

So I wanna make sure nobody fucks it up.

I never put so much emotion into any record

like I have into every song that's on American Idiot.

There are times where I feel like I get choked up

and I feel like it's hard to sing the next line

because everything comes from some emotional place

that i've experienced in my life

and it resurfaces every time that I play those songs.

It was the first time

I ever wrote about like my father dying.

So when I moved out I was 17,

you know, I started living in warehouses.

My dad died when I was 10, so I said seven years

- as if it was seven years later. - Right.

And then you go to, um, at the end, at the last verse,

- it says 20 years. - Right.

So it's an adult reminiscing about being a young adult.

And it just happened to be September?

Is that when it was?

Yeah, well he passed away in September,

and it's like the whole thing is kind of like that,

it's like the worst month of the year, you know.

I mean for some weird reason, some strange like coincidence,

I mean whether it's like my parent dying or...

To me it was all-it was a 9/11 kind of thing.

That's what resonated for me.

Here's the deal...

When we started really kicking around this idea,

we did not know if Green Day would give us permission

to do the production.

My heart was in my throat a little bit because I thought,

"what if this doesn't work for them?"

When people think of Broadway,

they think of everyone's singing and dancing and life is swell,

and you know, the Rockettes or something like that.

What we're gonna try and do today is map out the harder stuff.

My fear was that it was just gonna be sort of absurd,

and not relatable and corny.

At the start of the show

I lead my friends into this catharsis of

"there's gotta be something else out there.

This can't be all there is-

this town that's just sucking us dry."

get me the fuck out of turd town.

Let's start a war shall we?

American Idiot...

I would say 90 percent is sort of based on my life.

I just wanted to get the hell out of my town.

I wanted to leave with reckless abandon.

I didn't car where I ended up,

as long as I saw as much as humanly possible.

And it had nothing to do with where I came from.

That's what I was looking for.

And then break, and we'll just figure out who calls that,

and who makes the break.

In terms of the way that we plan to tell our story

in American Idiot, the closest thing would be opera.

In opera, you're telling your story

through the physical actions and character behavior

that accompanies the singing.

This is the dawning of the rest of our lives.

You're in the city now, so it's like this massive exultation

that you've finally arrived here.

So sing the sh-out of it

and then your bodies should just be like wild and mad.

We put the stuff together.

And you never really knew if Green Day

would dig what we're going to do with their material.

It was terrifying and incredibly important

to get Billie Joe's okay on it.

But we didn't see him again for quite a while

because they were touring in Europe.

We started Green Day when I was about 15 years old.

Coming from Berkeley we were always exposed to different politics

where people were really confrontational.

So around 2003,

because of what was happening in the administration

what was going on in the war in Iraq,

we started to take more of a personal stance.

I remember going on this walk and then thinking,

"I'm the son of rage and love, the Jesus of Suburbia".

Those two lines right there for me were,

"Oh my God, here we go".

Those two lines came out and they excited me

and scared the living piss out of me at the same time.

I remember cranking that record as loud as it would go,

and really just feeling understood.

For me, coming of age in post 9/11 United States,

there was this sense of sadness and disillusionment.

If you really take the time to sit with the lyrics,

they are wonderfully poetic.

I am the king of fuckdom!

Billie is writing about the world of suburbia

and convenience stores, and those things that you grew up with

that you hate so much.

I've never seen a cast connect to their characters

in such a profound way.

These characters are sort of us, extensions of us.

I've gone through those periods of time

where I've just felt this desperate longing

to get out into a bigger world than this.

You just feel like, you know,

you're just sinking in to quicksand.

Whether it has to do with romance or politics,

I'm just trying to figure things out.

A theme of mine, is just, you know, sort of just being...

you know, lost in chaos.

When I came on board,

the question was how do we take this iconic album,

that primarily is sung by one person,

and create characters and stories