Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House
January 12, 2018

Pop-punk band Green Day’s smash-hit American Idiot is now almost 14 years old but, for those of a certain age, the Bush-era protest album is already heavy with nostalgia. Released in 2004, three years after the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York (and the same year that Facebook launched) the concept album, which featured successful singles such as American Idiot and Jesus of Suburbia, took aim at corporate America and the right-wing media against the backdrop of the George Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2009 it became a musical (premiering in Califorina and opening on Broadway in 2010), with a book by the band’s frontman Billie Joe Armstrong and Michael Mayer, fleshed out with songs from Green Day’s next album 21st Century Breakdown.

Linden Furnell and ensemble in Green Day’s American Idiot. Photos © Ken Leanfore

In this Australian production directed by Craig Ilott, which premiered at QPAC last year, the stage is awash with messaging – televisions spew slogans, from “FUCK TRUMP” to Pro-Life exhortations, and billboards and graffiti are rife (there’s even a nod to the recently...