American Idiot with Shorewood High School

Somewhere around my senior year in high school, Green Day's Dookie came out. It felt weird to see a band that associated itself with punk rock sell 10 million albums. I’d read about the ’70s. I’d read about a movement that had passed-on while I was in plastic diapers. I'd read about how it died years before I could get into it. There I was in  high school and this punk-inspired band was doing very, very well. The older generation lamented. An aging John Lydon was understandably angry. (Again.) We used to have punk about anarchy and rebellion. Now we were getting punk about suburban listlessness and masturbation. (Literally.) I liked the album, but I didn't like that I liked it. There was a part of me that wanted my generation to embrace the energy of the faded punk revolution, but not like that. Dookie was the only Green Day that I ever owned. 

Years later, I heard Green Day’s American Idiot album and I actually kind of liked it. With some thought and focus, it actually kind of had something coherent to say. It was their best-reviewed album when it came out. I liked that it wasn’t the classic punk that I’d finally had a chance to listen to in depth on an MP3 player. Like any true artistic revolution with great merit, (jazz, rock, rap etc.) punk had been installed into the machinery of pop culture. And so naturally there was going to be a musical. It’s been over twenty years since Dookie came out, which means that it’s been that long since I graduated from high school. The musical based on American Idiot debuted a little over half a decade ago. It is meeting its first scholastic production in Wisconsin next month at Shorewood High School, where it could actually serve as an introduction to some of the disillusion and dissent felt by those of us who came of age in the ’90s. It’s strange to see Generation X brought onstage by millennials doing punk-inspired commercial rock for high school. Could be an interesting voyage for anyone who remembers being in high school when punk went mega-commercial at the end of the last century. 

Shorewood High School Drama’s production of American Idiot runs Feb. 4 - 6 at Shorewood High School on 1701 East Capitol Dr. For tickets and more information, visit Shorewood Drama online.