When Green Day released their raucous rock opera American Idiot back in 2004, no one knew that the album would turn out to be one of the biggest of their career, that it would lead to a massive world tour, win two Grammy Awards and multiple MTV Video Awards and ultimately become a Tony Award-winning Broadway show at the St. James Theatre. Perhaps the biggest irony is that the San Francisco punk trio had been recording songs for an album called Cigarettes and Valentines when the master tapes disappeared. Rather than re-record the songs, the group set about writing new music for what became American Idiot.
The album and show focus on a character named Jesus of Suburbia, a disaffected, angry young man who hates where he lives and goes to find his fortune in the city, ultimately caught between punk rebel St. Jimmy and nurturing revolutionary figure Whatshername. In the show, the protagonist has two friends, one of whom goes to the city but soon enlists in the Army and serves in the Iraq War, while the other stays behind at home to be with his pregnant girlfriend. The story's themes of media saturation and alienation are amplified by the stage set, which features manic lighting, striking set pieces (including a hydraulic lift and a four-story staircase with two string players perched at separate spots), a hyperactive wall of TVs broadcasting a plethora of images and a live band onstage cranking out the tunes.
In order for this colorful cornucopia of elements to come together seamlessly, Tony-winning scenic designer Christine Jones, Tony-winning lighting designer Kevin Adams and video/projection designer Darrel Moloney – who all worked on the original trial run at the Berkeley Rep in California – had to work in concert, so to speak.
"When I first came onto the project, the director [Michael Mayer], costume designer [Andrea Lauer], set designer, lighting designer and I all met for a week and went through the show scene by scene and talked about video ideas," recalls Moloney. "I think out of that meeting over 80 percent of the ideas we discussed are what is actually used in the show, which is a really high percentage to come from an initial meeting. As a team, I think we really shared the vision and aesthetic for the show. I knew I could trust every one of them to come up with what worked best for the show in every situation. "
"Our main goal was to work together with Michael to tell the story," explains Jones. "I think a scene like ‘Favorite Son' illustrates how all three [of us] – four, when you add costumes – are working together: the set allows the Favorite Son to appear to come out of one of the televisions, after the content on the TV has tried to set up who the guy is. Then, as the scene progresses, lights and projection work together to support his transformation from celebrity man to army man. A scene like ‘Holiday' also shows how a set element, the scaffolding, does one part of the job of telling you that you are on a road trip, and then lighting and projection join in to complete the picture."
Individual Inspiration
While this triumvirate of designers worked together and with others to assemble American Idiot onstage, they each came to the production with their own ideas. For the scenic design, which includes a staircase that ascends to the ceiling and hidden rooms that are exposed on the first and second floors of the set during various moments in the show, Jones "looked at artist's working spaces, warehouses where people live and work and play and at clubs like CBGB that were papered with old posters. Specifically there was a space used by a Chinese artist to build large installations, a collective space created by artists in Rhode Island and an installation that Mike Nelson did for Creative Time near the Essex Market that inspired me."
She adds that she enjoyed personalizing the stage with details that most people will likely notice. "Downstage right, there are three baseball bats hung in the exit wing, and on the wall, the lyrics to one of my favorite Radiohead tunes, ‘Videotape,' " she divulges. "There is a rope covered with colored tape that I acquired from the janitor's closet at Berkeley, there are drawings my kids did, and the props person made a macramé net for me for the basketball hoop. Lots of love, and the hands of many people, went into breathing life into the space."
For Maloney, his main inspiration was the media and all its forms. "There are so many different kinds of media in the show, from news and television to graphic animation, still photography, film – it really runs the gamut," he states. "Sometimes it's used to help tell story, sometimes to set place, and sometimes as a secondary commentary. One thing we talked about with the overall design and projections was we were not going to be precious. When we project on the set, we just blast across everything – stairs, televisions, band, car – everything." The video and projection featured a wide range of images – some created for the show, some borrowed from mass media – to reinforce the lyrical themes of the show.
Keeping with the wild, unfettered spirit of the show, Adams says that, lighting-wise, he wanted it "to look more like an unusual theatre event than a rock show at a large venue. I was hoping the event would be like going to the Metropolitan Opera and seeing a muscular rock show that appears from behind a simple red curtain. And I tried to keep all the rigging in the house minimal and uniformly hung so that it would not look like a big, messy rock show when the audience walked in. I didn't want it to look like the thing that people expect. I wanted the visual world to have rules that would subvert people's expectations."
Adams used 150 ETC Source Four Lekos, approximately 100 Source Four Pars and 11 Vari*Lite VL2416s, 25 VL2500 Spots and 20 of the new VLX LED units, "which were a dream," he declares. "I have the VLX units tightly hung vertically on each side of the proscenium and they act as audience blinders, as theatre architecture wash units, and I can also light the performance space and the 45-foot tall walls of the set with them. I also use them to create a series of brain-melting strobe effects throughout the show. I also had three followspots for each venue. And [moving light programmer] Victor Seastone came to Berkeley to program the show on an Eos, and he returned as the only programmer for the St. James production."
Adapt and Improve
Jones reports that the American Idiot set changed little from the original Berkeley production. But while the ground plan remained identical, there was less offstage space to work. "The crew was phenomenal at figuring out how to store items like the scaffolding and the hospital beds," she declares.
"I made a deal with the producers that I would use a similar strategy that I used when moving Spring Awakening from Off-Broadway to Broadway: that I would keep the design and gear somewhat simple for the first production and would layer in more complicated equipment for the transfer," says Adams. "So for the Broadway production, I added another 40 moving lights to the exact same package I had in Berkeley. During tech and previews, I pretty much left all the work I did in Berkeley alone and layered in more details created by the movers and also added a few more cues here and there. I didn't really touch the conventionals, strobes and scrollers that I had laid in Berkeley. "
The video design underwent a more substantial transformation from California to New York, according to Maloney. In Berkeley, there were six video feeds going to 38 monitors routed through a switch so they could have different configurations of monitors. In the New York production, there are 43 monitors with a distinct feed going to each one, which allows Maloney and his team "to have different images on every individual monitor at any time. It also opened up how I could program transitions and patterns. One place this was used to great effect is in the opening number. I was able to treat each video sequence to look like the kind of TV it was playing on – 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, etc. – since many of the monitors are dressed to look like older televisions."
Most of the original video/projection design took place over three months at Berkeley, and Maloney spend two more months revising and refining his work in New York. "The amount of media in this show is very high," he says. "It's the amount of media I used to create over the course of one year in my broadcast design business. There are over 600 pieces of media in the show made up of thousands and thousands of individual clips."
Maloney points out that in Berkeley they used many different brands of televisions, which was problematic, given all of their inherent color and contrast differences. He says it was impossible to get the content to look the same across all the monitors, which was most evident with the graphic pieces. They came up with a solution on Broadway: use Sony TVs exclusively.
For Maloney, the challenges in working with a set with dozens of TVs was how they could be used to tell the story and set place and mood without stealing focus from the performances. "The two techniques I found for this were pattern and chaos," he says. "If an image repeated over the monitors, they became pattern, and your eye could accept it and check in and out." The same applies when they were all different. "What would grab focus every time was one TV on by itself, or with different content. People would have a hard time looking away."
Productive Friendship
Having all three designers bond through the original Berkeley production of American Idiot certainly benefited its Broadway incarnation. Beyond that, notes Adams, he and Jones have been working closely together for a few years on several projects. "We speak almost daily about ideas we had, or reactions to ideas the other may have," he says, adding that the process of collaborating on Idiot was "terrific."
"One of the things we worked together on is the development of the PAR 64 strobes that hang on the set and point at the audience," said Adams. "I had several hanging from the large stair unit that she designed, and I also hid several in the fake vintage speaker clusters that she had scattered around the set. The strobes were hidden so well in the vintage speakers that we decided to put the strobes in the stairways into vintage speaker boxes also. When we moved to the St. James [in New York], Christine added a few more strobes and speaker boxes to the set."
Adams states that Jones would often come up with an idea and pass it on to him, or vice-versa. "For example, I told her I wanted to use a few dozen LED MR16 birdies in the tall walls of the set to act as tiny audience blinders," he continues, "and that they should be in sets of two, and that I really didn't care where they went on the wall. Christine took those basic rules and made a really neat layout of them that related to the various monitors on the walls."
Jones and Adams were also inspired by a laser show that they had seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and were eager to incorporate something similar into Idiot. "I had also recently seen an artist that creates lines of light in smoke using video projections, an effect very similar to the laser effect," adds Adams. "When we could not afford the laser, she, the video designer and I looked at various samples of moving lights and video projectors shooting through smoke and we all settled on using a video projection to make the effect. It's very similar to the laser effect she and I had originally seen. "
No Lighting Left Unused
Because Jones and Adams have worked together before, they found ways to not only reuse lighting concepts from within American Idiot but to transplant one into the remounting of a past show.
"After many different ideas, Christine, Michael and I came up with this light frame that we were going to add to the Broadway version of ‘Rock and Roll Girlfriend,'" says Adams. "The piece looked terrific and contained several circuits and looks, but after several tries, we just couldn't figure out a way to make the number work with it. After running a couple of weeks with the light frame in previews, we cut it. Around the same time we got a call to remount Everyday Rapture at the Roundabout's American Airlines Theatre. One of us had the idea to strike it from the St James and use it in Everyday Rapture, so we got the Roundabout to buy it and took it over [there]. It totally saved the last five minutes of the show there. It looks swell there, almost as if it were designed for the set."
Jones concurred. "It works perfectly for that production," adding, "We did add two flown elements to the [American Idiot] show: a fluorescent tube wall, and the frame of LED bulbs that eventually got cut. The fluorescent tube wall started as an addition to the ‘Favorite Son' number. While it helped focus the space in, we felt it also distracted from the main event of following the man who comes out of the TV to become the army general. Mayer and I talked about using it in [the song] ‘East 12th Street' instead, which already featured projections of fluorescent tubes, and then Kevin had the inspired idea to use gray gel on the tubes, which was not only beautiful, but perfectly dreary."
