Berkeley Rep’s Green Day rock-opera “American Idiot”- which world premiered last night at Berkeley Rep - is a hugely ambitious project that bombards with sound, vision and thrashing emotion. It looks, smells and sounds like teen spirit.
The plot takes a familiar path that goes like this: the anti-hero leaves home, lives in squalor, becomes disillusioned, rocks, rages against the machine, takes drugs, angsts more, rocks more and does more drugs. The end point is either death or redemption. And that's pretty much it.
