★★★☆☆
If you like your West End musicals to be glitzy and toe-tapping, this one might make your hair stand on end. American Idiot hails from the alternative school of pop-punk grunge, drawing on the Grammy-winning US band Green Day’s concept album of the same name, plus some of their other hits.
In the bowels of the small, subterranean Arts Theatre, the director-choreographer Racky Plews’s revival resembles a back alley crossed with a squat. An anarchist’s iconic circled “A” is graffitied in one corner above a lavatory caked with faux-theatrical filth.
Sporting gothic eyeliner, ripped jeans and, in some cases, rock-solid mohicans, Plews’s youngish cast launch into the title song. They headbang to thrashing electric guitars and holler Billie Joe Armstrong’s disaffected lyrics — about