Or, rather, pop-punk rock opera—Green Day, along with director Michael Mayer, is turning American Idiot into a musical with Broadway ambitions.

Mayer's other Broadway credits: Thoroughly Modern Millie; 'night Mother; You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown; Uncle Vanya; and Spring Awakening, for which he won a Tony.

“It doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Billie Joe Armstrong told the NYT—but it makes perfect sense. Mayer started listening to American Idiot while writing Spring Awakening and it shows. The musical is Southern California pop-punk about 19th-century German schoolkids and their feeling pent up about sex, school, religious parents, and abstinence eduction. Lots of angst and masturbation:

It's the bitch of living/With nothing but your hands/It's the bitch of living/As someone you can't stand.

It's the bitch of living/And living in your head/It's the bitch of living/And sensing God is dead.

“[American Idiot] was very much in my head all during that time,” Mr. Mayer said. “Sometimes I really would say things like, ‘Why can’t this have a groove like “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”?’"

American Idiot almost sounds like a sequel to Spring Awakening—the kids have graduated and moved out of their parents' house, shifting the frustration of confinement to the disillusion of freedom:

Based on the narrative of the album, the musical charts the lives of a circle of 20-somethings from the burbs as they strike out down different paths. Some stay put in their hometown, while others move to the big city and get sucked into the cycle of rock and drugs, and still others get shipped out to Iraq. What unites them all is the search for redemption in a world filled with sham, angst and broken dreams.

Musical theater, at least, is figuring out how to get the kids all excited for world premieres.