The disaffected, with guitars

GREEN DAY’S AMERICAN IDIOT

(Palace, Manchester, to Saturday)

IT started as a collection of songs, became a hit concept album and ended up not the movie they thought they were writing but a stage musical.

But that wayward progression seems just about right for US band Green Day’s 2010 cult hit, Tony-winning show, packed with all the energy, rage and rebellion of the American post-punk, post 9/11 white underclass you could reasonably contain on one stage.

“American Idiot” is about a country saturated with crass, manipulative TV and media coverage of modern life, endless desire and easy fixes that actually aren’t so easy.

One of the problems of the stage show is the nature of the characters. I always pale a little when cast lists have amorphous names and characters are used as ciphers in a larger story. Even Hollywood knows you have to personalise things. To call a female character Wassername (Amelia Lily) is perhaps taking informality too far. But that’s a small matter.

Unlike the album, the stage version tells the sketchy tale of three small-town friends who, bored with their lives, set off on adventures. Well, of a kind.

Johnny (Matt Thorpe) moves to the city and becomes a heroin addict; Tunny (last night Cellen Chugg Jones) joins the Army and loses a leg, and Will (Steve Rushton) stays at home and is kicked out when he tells his girlfriend he doesn’t want the baby she’s expecting.

They all find their way back, eventually, but this isn’t exactly an episode of the Brady Bunch.

Through it all, the staging, the lighting, and the tremendous energy of the show shine through. It’s not always pleasant, but there are always enough fans of the band in the audience to cheer their favourite numbers from a soundtrack that yielded several hit US singles.

That especially holds true of the final number, a mass rendition of “Time of Your Life” with the entire cast playing guitars — though without the gift of a downloadable digital version of that live number specially recorded for the audience at every performance, a gimmick of the US production.

Still you can’t have everything, and as the musical attempts to show, sometimes you can’t have anything.