Beck’s ‘American Idiot’ welcomes a new kind of tension Bob Abelman Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal Member, International Association of Theatre Critics According to a 1994 issue of Rolling Stone magazine, the underground band Green Day was comprised of “snotty little Berkeley, California, punk kids… three cheeky monkeys who came to raid the bar and disappear.” Raid they did but disappear they did not. Earlier this year, the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. One reason was that, in 2004, they produced the Grammy Award-winning concept album “American Idiot,” which followed the story of Johnny, a young and angry anti-hero who chooses to leave home for the city to find his voice as a musician and to find a girl, but finds instead drugs and crippling malaise. His best friends choose other paths with equally disastrous results. The magazine referred to the album as “a 57-minute politically charged epic” written at a time when there was little socially conscious discourse in pop music. The review goes on to note that the band “may rail hard, loud and long against the hysteria of a paranoid country compromised and commoditized by a media monolith, but they also lament, sweetly, like romantic poets from the days of yore, about the way the innocent never seem to last.” And so, too, does the 90-minute punk rock opera that resulted from this work, which hit the stage in 2010 when there was little socially conscious discourse in Broadway musicals (the previous year’s Tony Award for best musical went to “Billy Elliot”). It has just made its triumphant, full-frontal assault on the Beck Center for the Arts in Lakewood. For the rest of this review, go to: http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/