Billie Joe Armstrong‘s stint in rehab has obviously got his creative juices going – he’s begun writing songs for a new version of a Shakespeare play.
The Guardian reports that Armstrong will compose original material for a 2014 production of Much Ado About Nothing by the Yale Repertory Theatre in the UK.
Due in March and to be set in modern England, Playbill reports that the play will be renamed These Paper Bullets and “follows a Liverpool rock band as they find their way in the London music scene”. Interesting indeed.
Amstrong’s last venture into theatre was when he and his band – Green Day – worked with Berkeley Repertory Theatre for an adaptation of the band’s hit 2004 album American Idiot, which premiered in 2009. It later moved to Broadway, making almost $40m.
Green Day are set to return to the live stage with a performance at SXSW in Austin, Texas later today (US Time). The band had initially planned an extensive tour for their trilogy of albums !Uno!, !Dos! and !Tre!, released last year. However, those plans got de-railed when Armstrong entered rehab following his now-infamous on-stage meltdown at an awards show in Las Vegas.
Armstrong has since recovered from his stint in rehab and the band now have a string of North American dates and headlining slots at European Festivals ahead of them in the coming months. Earlier this week, they were announced as the final headliner of the Reading and Leeds Festivals in the UK in August.
