Next year at Yale Rep: Green Day meets the Bard

It's celebrity season at the Yale Repertory Theatre.

As if to compete with its own current sold-out run of Hamlet starring Paul Giamatti ’89, ’94MFA, the Rep has announced next year's lineup, and it includes a rock star: Billie Joe Armstrong, lead singer and guitarist for Green Day, will write songs for a modern take on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.

Called These Paper Bullets, the play features the Quartos, a "fab four from Liverpool" who venture to London in hopes of finding true love and cutting an album in seven nights, the Rep says.

Armstrong is not a musical-theater newbie: he co-wrote the stage version of Green Day's American Idiot, which ran on Broadway. Adapted by Emmy-nominated TV writer Rolin Jones ’04MFA (Weeds, Friday Night Lights) and directed by fellow Yale School of Drama grad Jackson Gay ’03, These Paper Bullets will make its world premiere at the Rep in March 2014.

Among the other 2013-14 offerings are A Streetcar Named Desire, a political farce by Dario Fo, and the world premiere of The House That Will Not Stand, written by Drama School alum Marcus Gardley ’04 and directed by Patricia McGregor ’09MFA.