A pulsating portrait of wasted youth that invokes all the standard genre conventions — bring on the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, please! — only to transcend them through the power of its music and the artistry of its execution, the show is as invigorating and ultimately as moving as anything I’ve seen on Broadway this season. Or maybe for a few seasons past.

Boy, that’s quite a statement. Isherwood may have fallen a bit too hard for the line that Green Day is punk. (Punk on Broadway! So edgy!) But I’m not sure that the radio-friendly American Idiot was ever quite as hardcore as Isherwood seems to think.

At the other extreme is New York Magazine’s Scott Brown, who calls the show “a half-exploitative, half-lobotomized attempt to fake a youthgasm” and a “purely gestural pantomime of astounding emptiness.”

Its version of youthful anomie is so far off the mark, and such a muddled conflation of vague Gen-X nostalgia and generic rebellion sample tracks, that the effect is almost comical. But mostly just irritating.

You should read the review for yourself, but just about every sentence is dripping with contempt for the show’s lack of authenticity. But why? He says the band’s original concept album was “excellent,” so how could this staging be so much worse than its source material? And what does it matter that Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong is “now-middle-aged,” as Brown is quick to note? (For the record, Armstrong turned 38 in February. So he’s no kid, but “middle aged”?) Did he somehow lose credibility by getting older?

Let’s face it: American Idiot was a great pop-rock-punk album that managed to find favor with both the critics and the masses because it pushed the envelope just far enough. So while I haven’t yet seen the show, I have a hard time buying that it could be that much better or worse than its source material.

• First, this awesome column by The New York Post’s Michael Riedel, in which he takes shots at both Nathan Lane and The Addams Family (“There he is, night after night, singing those bland, witless songs, cracking those hoary, witless jokes, pretending to like Bebe Neuwirth.”) and also casts doubt on whether the show is, in fact, a “critic-proof smash,” as The New York Times’ Patrick Healy wrote. Riedel isn’t nearly as impressed with The Addams Family’s box office numbers and speculates that they got a big boost from pre-sold group sales. A sidenote: On Friday, Nathan Lane filled in as Kelly’s co-host on Live with Regis and Kelly, where they agreed that critics’ opinions don’t really matter. Time will tell, I suppose.
• Daniel Radcliffe is coming back to Broadway next year as the ambitious window washer in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The NYT reported that the revival is slated for spring 2011 and will be directed by Rob Ashford. Radcliffe was last seen on Broadway in Equus. Presumably, he will not be showing us his magic wand this time.
• Poor Patton Oswalt can’t catch a break. The Hollywood Reporter wrote late Thursday that Oswalt has already been booted from his co-starring role in a new NBC pilot with Matthew Broderick. Deadline.com reported that the decision was made after the cast’s table read. I find this very depressing.
• And finally, Broadway will be welcoming some unconventional newbies. The National Football League is producing a new play about Vince Lombardi at Circle in the Square this fall. The play, called Lombardi, will star Dan Lauria, who you may remember from The Wonder Years. And next March, a new musical by creators of South Park and Avenue Q will premiere on Broadway. The Book of Mormon was written by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, along with Avenue Q composer and co-creator Robert Lopez. It will be directed by Parker and Jason Moore, who also helmed Jerry Springer: The Opera at Carnegie Hall. Sounds pretty sweet to me.

• In other news, recently laid off Variety critic David Rooney seems to be the latest addition to The New York Times‘ pool of theater reviewers. Today he weighed in on The 101 Dalmatians Musical at the Theater at Madison Square Garden. (He gave it a thumbs down.)

Two points, in particular, rankle: the blinkered New York mentality and the failure to appreciate new directions in playwriting. The board had an opportunity to correct these long-standing shortcomings, and it blew it.

In an era in which important new dramatic works rarely get their start in New York, the board’s geographical myopia, a vision of the American theater that starts in Times Square and ends just a short taxi ride away is especially disheartening. Does anyone really believe that “Next to Normal” would have been chosen had it been submitted when it was at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.?

Critic David Rooney – who served on the jury along with Duke University professor John Clum, Anna in the Tropics scribe Nilo Cruz, and Chicago Sun-Times critic Hedy Weiss – had a more even-tempered response. In an interview with Playbill today, Rooney declined to slam the board for its decision (or the process), but noted that Next to Normal had an automatic advantage over the three finalists submitted by the jury:

Any of us who cover theatre know that the nature of theatre itself is that you are there, you are experiencing it, you have a direct emotional impact. Whatever they’re seeing physically represented on a stage in front of them has a greater emotional impact than something they’re reading on the page. Seeing it on the stage [is seeing it] in its intended form. Aside from the people on the board who saw the Sarah Ruhl play during its Broadway run, or perhaps who saw the Chicago or L.A. productions of the other two short-listed titles, no one is experiencing the play fully as it was intended. So, Next to Normal already has a huge advantage there. As did other things they might have seen in New York, The Orphans’ Home Cycle, Next Fall.

(The NYT’s Patrick Healy has discovered that at least some of the Pulitzer board took in a performance of Next to Normal right before the final vote to overrule the jury’s recommendations. He also interviewed Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler, who defended the decision.)

Anyway, here is McNulty’s backhanded congratulations to Next to Normal: “The musical’s rock score may be generic and its understanding of mental illness simplistic, but there’s a searching emotional quality to the piece, which was expertly staged by Michael Greif in a production dominated by Alice Ripley’s raw, Tony-winning performance.”

Ah well. At least the board didn’t get tickets to Rock of Ages.

UPDATE: Ben Brantley weighs in, saying that this is nothing to get worked up about because the Pulitzers are “an index of solid bourgeois tastes over the years but not much more.” Ha!

Imagine, if you dare, the agonies of the talented people trapped inside the collapsing tomb called “The Addams Family.” Being in this genuinely ghastly musical — which opened Thursday night at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater and stars a shamefully squandered Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth — must feel like going to a Halloween party in a strait-jacket or a suit of armor. Sure, you make a flashy (if obvious) first impression. But then you’re stuck in the darn thing for the rest of the night, and it’s really, really uncomfortable. Why, you can barely move, and a strangled voice inside you keeps gasping, “He-e-e-lp! Get me out of here!

Presumably, the show’s marketing team anticipated the critical onslaught. Yesterday, they started featuring “Word of Mouth” reviews on The Addams Family web site featuring “real people” who actually liked the show. And to be fair, it did get a rave from Bloomberg’s John Simon, though I bet he’s feeling pret-ty silly about that today.