What it took to bring American Idiot to Seattle stage

Green Day’s Billy Joe Armstrong performs in the Broadway staging of his theatrical production based on the multi-platinum hit album American Idiot

The idea of turning a hit rock album into a Broadway
musical is nothing new, but it’s no easy feat. That was
the challenge facing Green Day after the band decided to
bring the multi-platinum selling smash American Idiot to
the stage. So songwriter Billy Joe Armstrong turned to
Pulitzer and Tony-award winning composer and orchestrator
Tom Kitt for help.

American Idiot would go on to win a number of big awards
, and is now touring the country with a highly anticipated
run starting Tuesday at Seattle’s Paramount Theater.

I spoke with Kitt this week via phone in New York where
he’s prepping his latest production, a musical based on
the hit cheerleading movie Bring It On, about what it took
to create the Broadway smash.

“It’s a huge challenge especially because you’re dealing
with an album that is beloved and it would be very easy to
see my arrangements and take issue with them if they’re
not serving the material,” Kitt says.

“But because I loved this band and this material so much I
really got how it could work. I really thought about
George Martin and how he worked with the Beatles because
he’s a hero of mine and I think the way that he
orchestrated around the compositions in a way that the
composition never felt like it was tampered with still
felt like the Beatles but there was this other layer that
George Martin provided. That’s kind of what I wanted to
do.”

It would be easy to dismiss Green Day’s music as overly
simplistic, run of the mill three-chord rock (plenty of
critics and music snobs have taken their share of shots.)
But Kitt says the songs on American Idiot are way more
than that.

“These guys are impeccable writers. Their material is
very deeply layered and complex and I’m a sucker for
melody. And this band creates such strong melodic content
in their music, you have an emotional response when you
hear it. So it didn’t feel awkward and wrong for me to
incorporate strings and other instrumentation ideas and
other vocal ideas because it felt like that’s where the
music was going,” Kitt says.

American Idiot runs Tuesday through Sunday June 10th at
the Paramount.

-Josh Kerns/Seattle Sounds co-host