AS they assessed the pre-Broadway tryout of the new musical “American Idiot” in California last fall, the director, Michael Mayer, and his creative team kept coming back to the same question: Should they add more dialogue to flesh out the tormented journeys of the three main characters or continue to rely on the songs — by the bandGreen Day — to do the storytelling?

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Mike Dirnt, with his band mates, Billie Joe Armstrong and Tré Cool, signing the St. James Theater, home of “American Idiot.”

At 95 minutes, perhaps the musical could be clarified by giving more lines to the best friends at its core: Johnny, whose pursuit of big city life is hobbled by drug addiction; Tunny, whose intoxication with patriotism and war has horrifying consequences; and Will, who is left behind with a pregnant girlfriend and a much-used bong.

But for Mr. Mayer, less was more, he recalled in a recent interview. Ever since he first heard the 13 tracks on Green Day’s smash 2004 album, “American Idiot,” his dream had been to spin an ambitious rock opera out of that song list. To him no dialogue could improve on the album’s anthem of alienation, “Jesus of Suburbia”:

There’s nothing wrong with me

This is how I’m supposed to be

In the land of make-believe

That don’t believe in me.

“American Idiot” has now reached Broadway as one of the most anticipated musicals of the spring, set to open on April 20, and Mr. Mayer’s belief in the power of Green Day’s explosive melodies and anguished lyrics is being put to the test. (At two recent preview performances many audience members cheered loudly after several numbers and stood to applaud at the end.)

There is even less dialogue in the Broadway production than in the tryout at Berkeley Repertory Theater, Mr. Mayer said, a sign of his faith not only in the rock opera form but also in the potential of punk rock to move audiences of any age or musical taste.

“The 13 songs on ‘American Idiot’ contain a complete emotional journey,” said Mr. Mayer, joined in the interview in the theater’s upstairs lounge by Green Day, the creative team and the cast. “My idea all along was to keep the 13 songs in their original order and to interrupt it at times with other Green Day songs and the sparest of dialogue, because I didn’t want to have any extraneous words.”

“I love the way the actors are delivering the lines,” he added, “but the voice of the show is Green Day.”

To create a Broadway rock opera that was in the tradition of “The Who’s Tommy” (1993) and also satisfied the expectations of the band has been a carefully executed two-year undertaking. Mr. Mayer, the Tony Award-winning director of “Spring Awakening,” a 2006 musical about embittered youth, started with one advantage: Billie Joe Armstrong, the lead guitarist and singer of Green Day, had an affinity for theater, having learned as a boy to sing along with show tunes from musicals like “Oliver!” and “42nd Street.”

“Storytelling has always been at the heart of much of my music,” Mr. Armstrong said. Referring to himself and his two band mates, the bassist Mike Dirnt and the drummer Tré Cool, he continued: “When we started working on the ‘American Idiot’ album, we talked about doing a mini-opera, and each of us wrote 30-second songs about exactly where we were in our lives. I had gotten a D.U.I., so I was down at the police station. Mike was at the studio by himself, and Tré was arguing with his ex-wife. And we started seeing this arc of a story that we felt we wanted to tell.”

The album’s narrative thread entwines two dissipated characters, named Jesus of Suburbia and St. Jimmy, but Mr. Mayer felt the music and lyrics supported a larger story about disaffected youth disgusted with George W. Bush, the news media and authority figures. He decided to build the musical around a tight-knit group of young men — partly inspired by the long friendships of the Green Day members, he said, though with fictional story lines for Johnny, Tunny and Will.

Mr. Mayer already had the outlines of the show in his head when he invited Mr. Armstrong, through mutual connections, to a performance of “Spring Awakening” in the fall of 2007. Over drinks afterward at the theater district spot Bar Centrale, Mr. Armstrong raved about the show and one of the lead actors, John Gallagher Jr., who played the emotionally tortured German schoolboy Moritz — and whom Mr. Mayer had in mind to play Johnny in “American Idiot.”

“Seeing ‘Spring Awakening’ changed how I saw Broadway,” Mr. Armstrong said. “It was so cutting-edge and different and current. And there was also something reminiscent of Jesus of Suburbia in the songs and anguish of John’s character.”

Mr. Gallagher said Green Day was one of the bands that had the most influence on his relationships to singing and music; he played guitar in a punk-rock band in high school and still performs sometimes in New York City.

“When ‘American Idiot’ came out, it was a time when I didn’t hear the truth on the radio, ever,” Mr. Gallagher said, alluding to talk radio in the fall of 2004 as President Bush sought and won re-election. “With lesser music it might have been really hard to develop a musical out of rock songs. But this album told a real story about the anger and frustration that so many young people felt about the war and politics at the time.”

In the spring of 2008 Green Day gave Mr. Mayer exclusive rights for six months to develop a concept for the musical. Tom Kitt, who came onboard to create orchestrations, recalled proceeding cautiously in exploring how to spread Green Day’s melodies and lyrics among a large cast (now 19) while also being sensitive to how the band might want its songs performed.

“At our first workshop with Green Day in 2008 I wanted to show that if they really needed to see their album up onstage as is, we could do that, but there were also possibilities here,” Mr. Kitt said. The first song he presented was “Whatsername,” intended as the musical’s finale (as it is on the album). While Green Day’s version has a hard-edged, metallic sound, Mr. Kitt created a piano and cello arrangement that packs a more direct emotional wallop.

“They flipped over that,” Mr. Kitt said of the band members, “and I said to Michael: ‘This is a great sign. We can open up the album and take some chances.’ ”

Soon after, Mr. Mayer flew to London to see the play “Black Watch” and its choreographer, Steven Hoggett, who had drawn intensely physical performances from actors playing a Scottish regiment in Iraq. The two men discussed ways to reflect a thrashing punk sensibility in a musical other than through traditional song and dance.

“I imagined what it would be like being a Green Day fan and seeing a Green Day show as a musical, and I knew there wouldn’t be girls doing high kicks,” Mr. Hoggett said. “No one should look like they’re suddenly dancing. Rather, I started with images and shapes. Johnny’s story is all glitter and sparks, Will’s in a very dull-brown environment, and Tunny is driven and pure and then gets smashed up.”

Some scenes were daunting. Mr. Hoggett said he was “terrified” by the nine-minute length of the song “Jesus of Suburbia” and spent two days roughing out the choreography with the cast and Mr. Mayer. As in “Black Watch,” the actors bound around the stage in packs like exuberant schoolkids at the last bell before summer vacation; moments later, the mood darkens as they slow down and mingle aimlessly while the lyrics place them in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven.

The band members said they gave wide latitude to the musical’s creators, thought there were some creative differences, usually about sound. Mr. Mayer and Mr. Kitt recalled that the band questioned whether an acoustic guitar was the best way to start the song “She’s a Rebel,” which celebrates the vivacity of the character Whatsername. The creators instead decided on a string trio that, they said, added whimsy and lightness.

And while the narrative arc of the musical can be quite grim, Mr. Mayer chose not to be too cruel to his characters. At least two of them could have easily died, but Mr. Mayer said he wanted to avoid that after having two main characters dead at the end of “Spring Awakening.”

Instead the creators sought to balance spiritedness and despair. In the number “Last Night on Earth,” one of several Green Day songs in the show that are not from the “American Idiot” album, the lovers Johnny and Whatsername shoot up heroin supplied by the demonic St. Jimmy character.

In a “ballet of rubber tubing,” as members of Green Day have called the choreography, the lovers tie themselves together with the kind of band that heroin addicts use to tie off body parts when finding a vein to inject. The lyrics declare, “My beating heart belongs to you.”

“To take this scene of Johnny and Whatsername doing heroin and turn it into some of the most beautiful and evocative shapes I’ve ever seen — it was an incredible moment,” said Mr. Dirnt, the Green Day bassist. “Real theater.”