For all their Berkeley punk-rock bona fides — unassailable and enough to send a certain kind of ill-prepared theatergoer headed for an early exit — Green Day songs are actually filled with hope and longing. They 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.

When you add the narrative throughline of Green Day's inarguably operatic masterpiece, "American Idiot," to that crucial duality of feeling, you have material ideal for the musical theater.