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Spring Awakening
The trouble with many “rock” musicals is their scores represent a musical-theater composer’s idea of what rock sounds like. Spring Awakening, about the tragic lusts of sheltered, hormonal teens (based on 19th-century playwright Frank Wedekind’s scandalous censor-bait), smartly avoids that dilemma by not using a musical-theater composer. No one would accuse mellow singer-songwriter Sheik of being too hardcore, but there’s clearly a pop-trained sensibility in his score that comes from outside the Tin Pan Alley–tinged Broadway tradition: Here there are chords, combinations and dissonances that we just don’t expect to hear in a conventional musical. The effect is thrilling.
Then again, Awakening isn’t exactly a conventional musical. These repressed Teutonic teens don’t break into song in continuity. Faced with feelings they can’t understand and cruel or dismissive adult authority figures, they sing at their moments of greatest frustration and confusion, expressing what they don’t know how to say. Then, as now, rock serves as teenagers’ proxy for rebellion.
The intentional disconnect between book scenes and songs—Sater’s lyrics shift into modern language as the actors pull out handheld mikes—might quell some audience members’ discomfort with musicals’ heightened form. But the panoply of dilemmas plucked from Wedekind’s work (masturbation, homosexuality, incest, abortion), and the bluntness with which Sater and director Mayer present them, prove a litmus test for our continuing prudishness regarding frank representations of teens and sex.
The terrific young touring cast gets it just right: For teenagers, whether in 1891 or 2009, all that yearning and churning does feel like life and death. Perhaps never before on stage has that feeling of roiling teen turmoil been better expressed than in the explosive second-act showstopper “Totally Fucked,” with Bill T. Jones’s jittery choreography perfectly capturing agitation and angst, while Kevin Adams’s lighting design rivals the MCA’s Olafur Eliasson show for the city’s best use of fluorescents. Simply put: It rocks.
