08 | October | 2017 | Art on My Sleeve

Review: American Idiot

By Perry Tannenbaum

Young love and the ills of the world are so frequently the focus of rock musicals that we sometimes feel little need to decipher the words that jangle together with the actions and emotions we’re seeing onstage. This week is a particularly rockin’ and raucous week in Charlotte, with the 20-year revival tour of Rent and the new Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte production of American Idiot opening on consecutive nights.

The original premiere of the Jonathan Larson musical and the 2004 Green Day album were separated by a mere eight years. While the young adult angst lived on, the world had completely changed: the old preoccupations with AIDS and AZT were supplanted by post-9/11 disillusionment and a scattershot scorn for suburbia, corporate America, the war-mongering George W, and the powerlessness of teens to change any of it.

Actor’s Theatre certainly knows powerlessness. Scheduled to open their new location on Freedom Drive last October, they had to be content to offer tours of their production-ready facility. Governmental regulations, foot-dragging and red tape have pushed back the opening to a still undetermined date in 2018. For a second consecutive show, Actor’s Theatre is relying on the kindness of Queens University and their Hadley Theatre, a facility they share with Myers Park Traditional School. Once you get past the decorous entrance and the antiseptic hallway, the black box venue actually possesses much of the off-Broadway feel we’ve come to expect from this company.

At the core of this production are a stage director, music director, choreographer, and a couple of lead actors who have figured prominently in past Actor’s Theatre productions at their demolished former home on Stonewall Street. They may be taking their exile from a permanent home personally, now that it’s prolonged to nearly 18 months, with an understandable urge to scream. Producing artistic director Chip Decker didn’t appear to be worried about reining any of them in, especially music director Ryan Stamey and choreographer Tod A. Kubo.

Stamey stands behind a keyboard at the edge of the stage, looking up at a six-piece band perched above the middle of the stage, occasionally leaning into a microphone and joining the vocalists. There’s a cellist embedded in the sextet whom I never heard. Likewise, the tropical strains of steel guitar, so clearly soothing in the background of the Broadway cast album on “Give Me Novacaine,” has been almost completely sandpapered away by Stamey’s heavy-metal approach.

The storyline, not exactly robust on the Grammy Award-winning concept album, has been somewhat bolstered by lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong and stage director Michael Mayer in their book. Instead of a single Jesus of Suburbia, the musical has three. We have the original Johnny, who escapes the burbs only to encounter his hipster, heroin-shooting alter ego, St. Jimmy, and the possible love of his life, Whatsername.

At a neighborhood 7-Eleven, Johnny meets two other chums who have been crucified by suburbia – and turned into American Idiots – Will and Tunny. Only one of those two will use the bus tickets Johnny has purchased for the trio’s glorious breakaway. Will’s girlfriend, Heather, shows up and places his hand on her belly, obviating the need of saying to him that she’s pregnant. Apparently, punk rockers aren’t very articulate, for Tunny doesn’t do much of anything in the big city, mostly lying face down on a bed until lured by a US Army commercial to go off and fight in an unspecified foreign war.

With two more self-pitying saviors and two additional girlfriends worked into the story – Tunny eventually finds The Extraordinary Girl – Armstrong added more Green Day music to his score, conveniently taken from 21^st Century Breakdown, the follow-up album to American Idiot. Their decibel level tamped down to barely bearable, the band is so face-meltingly loud that you have to admire the singers’ will to prevail. Decker doles out the most expressive and outré action to Johnny and St. Jimmy, keying electrifying performances from Matt Carlson and Jeremy DeCarlos respectively.

From his defiant and rebellious posturing in suburbia, Carlson became pure decadence in the city, simulating casual sex, shooting dope, and reeling around in a stupor as he sang. To contrast with this charismatic dissipation, DeCarlos had to take extreme measures to strike us as Johnny’s inner Beelzebub. There has always been a physical resemblance between DeCarlos and Jimi Hendrix, and I had to suspect that St. Jimmy would be the role to set it loose. Costume designer Carrie Cranford audaciously joined in the conspiracy, supplying a flamboyant jacket that evokes the Hussar military jacket Hendrix sported back in the late ‘60s. There wasn’t a headband or a Mexican bandit’s sombrero in the outfit, but the outrageous hairdo more than compensated, so puffed and straightened that I didn’t notice the thin dangling braids at first.

Coupled with this look were spell-casting gesticulations that went beyond the Wicked Witch of the West and World Wide Wrestling in their shamelessness, and I’ve never heard DeCarlos sing with such ferocity before, though there are also seductive and manic moments for St. Jimmy. Where exactly in this charismatic performance the ministrations of Kubo’s choreography began was difficult for me to divine, but the choreographer should definitely get a large proportion of the credit for making this American Idiot such an immersive, visceral experience. Like Actor’s Theatre general manager Martin Kettling told us in his curtain speech, the ensemble frequently used the platform looming above the stage as a jungle gym, often joining the musicians at the top. Over and over, I saw daring dance moves that must have come after Kubo hopefully asked, “Can you try this?” in rehearsals.

Some of the most arresting action came from the women, differentiating the Charlotte American Idiot from the Broadway edition, where hard rock seemed to be the exclusive playpen of macho sexist louts. Nonye Obichere was particularly stunning as Whatsername, all Johnny could handle and more, singing and dancing with a dominatrix edge. As Heather, Lizzie Medlin was more bitchy and Gothic, upstaging Steven Buchanan, who was mostly confined to the vicinity of a sofa once Will grudgingly chose domesticity as his direction in life.

Grant Zavitkovsky was underpowered, undermiked, and largely unintelligible as Tunny in the early going, but those problems thankfully vanished by the time he enlisted. While the budgetary concessions Decker made in his set design worked well, the technical economies he adopted meant that Tunny’s wartime travails were far less catastrophic. No matter how well Grant Zavitkovskyperformed the role, The Extraordinary Girl couldn’t be nearly as extraordinary in her devotion.

There’s a self-critical bent in Armstrong’s leading men that is totally at odds with the striving, sentimental nobility and martyrdom of the Rent heroes and heroines. Lyrical and melodic takeaways from American Idiot aren’t as vivid or memorable as those you might find in the sassy “Out Tonight” or the anthemic “What You Own” that Larson crafted for his glorified squatters. I didn’t find myself nearly as much on the side of Armstrong’s troubled American Idiots, but I did feel they should be listened to. Even if I hadn’t known how passionately Carlson and DeCarlos felt about this music, I would have heard it in their voices and seen it in their actions.

Review: Finding Neverland

By Perry Tannenbaum

So wait a second: John Davidson – the Hollywood Squares host and the incurably wholesome crooner on too many variety shows to completely avoid – is far better now as an actor than he ever was as a TV personality or a singer??!? Capable of savagery and raw power? Watching the Charlotte premiere of Finding Neverland at Belk Theater earlier this week turned my long-held convictions upside-down.

Davidson takes on the role of Peter Pan playwright James M. Barrie’s implacable theatre producer, Charles Frohman, becoming the inspiration for Barrie’s most famous villain, Captain James Hook. While Billy Harrington Tighe stars as Barrie alongside Christine Dwyer as Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, the mother of four adorable boys who help liberate the playwright’s inner child, it’s Davidson who dominates. Since the current Charlotte engagement is the first of a 24-city tour through April 2018, theatergoers across the US from Rhode Island to Arizona should be on the lookout for Davidson’s bravura.

Maybe “dominates” isn’t the right word for what Davidson accomplishes, for he rescues a show that flounders rather pitifully through nearly the entire first act, despite the sometimes strained efforts of Tighe and Dwyer, the hyperactivity of the purportedly inspirational kiddies, and assorted meaningless outbursts of spectacle that end up pointing up what they’re intended to hide – a total absence of imagination, magic, and enchantment. Adding to this strain to entertain, amid a moribund book by James Graham paired with tepid music and lyrics by Gary Barlow and Eliot Kennedy, sound designer Jonathan Deans seems to have potted volume levels some 15-20 decibels above those I experienced at the 2015 Broadway production.

Deans’ ministrations, however, prove to support a key strategic aim of director Diane Paulus as we sail into intermission. The final two songs prior to the break, “Hook” and “Stronger,” almost literally explode, undergirded by thunderous volleys of percussion that seem to shake the walls of the theater. Here is where Frohman, after throwing a portentous shadow of a hook onto the upstage wall, transforms into Captain Hook and Scott Pask’s mix of Victorian and Kensington Garden settings suddenly turns dark, swarming with pirates.

It’s a thrusting nautical moment that echoes the thrill of Douglas Sills singing “Into the Fire,” when the foppish Sir Percy Blakeney, exhorting his marauding band of revolutionaries, showed his true heroic self for the first time in The Scarlet Pimpernel. It’s Tighe latching onto Davidson’s lurid coattails to become stronger. But Hook doesn’t materialize out of thin air – or that comical silhouette. He explains that he is actually a part of Barrie that the playwright has kept repressed.

The Davies siblings have liberated Barrie’s inner child, but it’s Hook who unleashes the beast. After intermission, he even prods the unhappily married Barrie to give the widowed Mrs. Davies a kiss.

So it’s almost accurate to say that Davidson co-stars with Tighe as Barrie, for there are times when he’s clearly sharing the role. Yet even when Davidson is aboard with all of Frohman’s orneriness, all is not well. Confronted with Barrie’s script for Peter Pan, the first rehearsal scene that Frohman presides over is fairly lame; and when the conceited, over-refined acting troupe adjourns to a pub, where Barrie and Sylvia encourage them to “Play” more like children, the regression humor falls even flatter. Graham would like us to believe that legitimate actors are familiar with King Lear and not A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and that Barrie’s previous masterwork, The Admirable Crichton, was a clichéd drawing room comedy.

Graham’s book improves slightly when the four boys prepare to entertain their mom and Barrie with Peter Davies’ new play. But if the boys’ “We’re All Made of Stars” nearly rises to that festive backyard occasion, we must endure the lackluster “When Your Feet Don’t Touch the Ground” when Barrie and Peter (Connor Jameson Casey on the night I attended) have their most dramatic father-son exchange. With more touching emotional power, the musical ascends from there as Peter Pan premieres and triumphs while Elizabeth expires.

Somehow it doesn’t matter that Dwyer hasn’t given us any indication of Elizabeth’s frailty until moments before she exits to her deathbed. Graham finally mixes some magic into the personal transformations of Barrie and Peter, Daniel Wurtzel sprinkles in some enchanting air sculpture from Fairyland, and a little glint of that fairy dust begins to gleam in Frohman’s child-hating soul.

Maybe when Kelsey Grammer growled as Hook and softened as Frohman in the original Broadway cast, the ending had more emotional power than this. I seriously doubt it. I can only say that the leaden ending I experienced when an understudy took over the role at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre did not begin to compare with the climax that brought a nearly full house to its feet at Belk Theater on opening night. Barlow and Kennedy never seem to even search for Neverland, let alone succeed in finding it, but Davidson certainly does with his astonishing Phoenix-like rebirth.