‘American Idiot’ LA Theater Review: 20 Years Later, Green Day’s Music Is More Than Just a Millennial Howl

“American Idiot,” the Green Day musical that opened Wednesday at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum, begins with visuals of Donald Trump.  

It’s a fitting start to director Snehal Desai’s updated staging of the 2010 Tony-winning musical, here a Deaf West Theatre and Center Theatre Group co-production performed jointly in spoken English and American Sign Language with both hearing and Deaf actors. A musical call to arms adapting Green Day’s seminal 2004 concept album of the same name – itself a Grammy-winning, post-9/11 indoctrination of the Bush years – the musical seethes with a rousing, underbelly rage that feels as appropriate today as it did 15 or 20 years ago.