The Abominable Showman: Tom Kitt and American Idiot

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Ain’t nothing like a Pulitzer
Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning composer Tom Kitt sits down for a frank tete-a-tete about the landmark Broadway musical American Idiot – which headlines Quebec City, Montreal, Kitchener, Hamilton and Toronto in early 2014 – and what it feels like to see one’s name up in lights on the Great White Way …

by Richard Burnett 

@bugsburnett

John Cameron Mitchell famously debuted his drag-punk rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the gloriously rundown Jane Street Theatre in NYC’s West Village back in 1998, the very same venue where Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer and conductor Tom Kitt kicked off his sensational Broadway career with a bang back in 2002, working on the raunchy Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical, which was adapted from the 1978 porn film that starred Bambi Woods. 

“That was one of my first big shows,” says Kitt who has since gone on to score such musicals as the landmark Next to Normal (for which he won the Pulitzer with his old friend Brian Yorkey, with whom he attended the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop as a team when they were both students at Columbia University) and, of course, the Tony and Grammy-winning rock musical American Idiot, for which Kitt arranged the music of Green Day for the Broadway stage.

The North American national tour of American Idiot – which tells the story of three lifelong friends forced to choose between their dreams and the safety of suburbia in a post 9/11 world – will headline in Quebec City (Jan 2-3, 2014) and Montreal (Jan 4-5) before headlining several cities across Ontario in March 2014.

“American Idiot is a wonderful musical and I am so proud to be a part of such a visceral show,” Kitt told me this week.

Review: (Toronto) American Idiot

Scott J. Campbell (photo credit: Doug Hamilton)

Bells and Whistles signifying...

Is there any there there in American Idiot?

by Axel Van Chee

With more bells and whistles than the biggest Santa’s sled imaginable, American Idiot by Green Day arrives at Toronto Centre for the Arts just in time to ring in the new year. It dazzles with psychedelic colours, exudes an abundance of energy and is unapologetically loud (unlike the Berkeley premiere, ear plugs are not provided). It is also chock-full of the best selling songs from the same-name album to satisfy the most rabid of fans, all superbly orchestrated by Tom Kitt, and performed admirably by the band under Jared Stein. It is also deep down, at the risk of irking all the Green Day fans out there, much ado about nothing.