My tickets were comped for review purposes courtesy of ATG.

A jukebox musical based around the songs of Green Day isn’t as bizarre an idea as that sounds. American Idiot, the Grammy Award-winning album that kicked off the trio’s second coming as arena-punk giants, was written as a “punk-rock opera” – even if the band never actually planned for it to end up onstage.

Now marking an unlikely 10th anniversary, and with a brace of Tony awards to its name, American Idiot – the musical co-created by Billie Joe Armstrong and theatre director Michael Mayer – is touring UK theatres with a star-studded cast. The result is… kind of a hot mess, if I’m honest, but with a cracking soundtrack guaranteed to get you out of your seat.

The show fleshes out the plot of Green Day’s 2004 album with the addition of b-sides, tracks from 2009 follow-up 21st Century Breakdown and a Kerplunk!-era outtake that every other reviewer will tell you was newly-recorded for the show, but every other reviewer didn’t have Dave Hughes as her +1. It tracks a year in the life of three disaffected American youths as they try to escape suburbia and figure out their places in a chaotic, post-9/11 America.

Johnny (Waterloo Road‘s Tom Milner) and Tunny (Joshua Dowen) escape suburban Jingletown for a new life in the city, while Will (Samuel Pope) stays at home to try to build a life with his pregnant girlfriend Heather (Siobhan O’Driscoll). Johnny meets the magnetic Whatsername (The X Factor’s Sam Lavery) and charismatic drug dealer St Jimmy (fellow X Factor alumnus Luke Friend) and turns to heroin, while Tunny joins the army and is deployed to what we assume is Iraq.

The company all look the part with their coloured hair and ripped band t-shirts, all stage-school-meets-punk-rock-brat waving middle fingers instead of full jazz hands (although I refuse to buy Johnny maintaining his edges so cleanly in the throes of a heroin addiction). The staging has an apocalyptic Mad Max feel, choice lyrics scattered in the graffiti, while the live band on the upper level get to interact with the performance, adding to the rock concert feel and providing the set-up for the best joke of the night.

It is, however, difficult for the cast – Milner in particular, who does much of the heavy lifting in his “Jesus of Suburbia” role – to avoid falling into the trap of the jukebox musical: that of aping the band whose songs are at the centre of the piece rather than letting the words tell the story of the show. The accent work that the name of the show forces on the British cast here doesn’t help here, leaving the limited dialogue in the mostly sung-through performance pretty unintelligible. Indeed, I had to get Dave to explain the particularly pivotal question of the St Jimmy character’s identity at the bus stop later on.

It means that, for me at least, the best performances come from the women – with “21 Guns” in the second act a particular highlight. It’s a shame then that the female characters are so underdeveloped: Heather’s a shrew; and Lavery, whose pop training belies a rock vocal and attitude that means you can’t take your eyes off her on stage, plays a character literally called Whatsername. I was convinced that a scene where Tunny, in hospital with war injuries, seemingly hallucinates an exotic dancer with light-up wings was an elaborate metaphor for getting hooked on morphine, until he ended up with her (fully clothed) at the end. The character’s name? I shit you not: Extraordinary Girl (no shade to Raquel Jones, a phenomenal dancer who did not deserve such Manic Punky Dream Girl bullshit).

Here’s the thing though: the entire theatre was on its feet by the end and it wasn’t difficult to see why thanks to phenomenal songs, performed by great singers, which mean the world to people (I refer you to the dude sitting near us who, overcome, couldn’t stop himself to singing along under his breath to “Wake Me Up When September Ends” despite it coming at one of the quietest, most emotive moments of the show). If you’re a Green Day fan, I think you’ll find plenty to love here.

American Idiot is on at King’s Theatre, Glasgow until 1st June and then continuing to Bradford, Aberdeen, Cheltenham and Liverpool – with more dates to be announced.