"Spring Awakening' at Academy of Music (2nd review)

If ever a play deserved a rock music score, it's Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening.

Sixty years before James Dean used a switchblade to carve his name into the cultural landscape, Wedekind's 1891 "children's tragedy" painted broad strokes of teen angst in the interwoven stories of a group of 14-year-olds. His controversial play infused themes of suicide, sadomasochism, sexual experimentation, abortion, ill-fated young love and general despair, tinged throughout with the longing to grow up into a better world of their own creation. And while the word teenager had yet to enter the lexicon (and wouldn't until 1941), signs of ill-tempered adolescence exploded everywhere in fin de siècle Germany.

Caught between childhood ignorance and adult knowledge, Wendla (played by the angelic Christy Altomare) wants to feel like "a little fairy queen" wearing a child's dress one last summer, even while begging her mother (Angela Reed) to explain where babies come from. Meanwhile, Hanschen (Andy Mientus) masturbates to Desdemona's murder in Othello; later, he and Ernst (Ben Moss) go off to "do a little Achilles and Patroclus" (anyone lucky enough to have read The Loves of Achilles by Sophocles knows what this kind of experimentation involves).

The lures of atheism and socialism

The nervy Moritz (Blake Bashoff) can't focus in school after his first nocturnal emission; quoting directly from Wedekind, he exclaims, it's "as if the entire world's mesmerized by penis and vagina." His pal Melchior (Kyle Riabko)— the young rebel whom (surprise!) every girl in school likes— tries to rise above his desires by retreating intellectually into atheism and socialism.

The parents, teachers, and clergy (all played by Reed or Henry Stram) offer no help in defusing their charges' conflicting emotions; instead they look only to suppress the students' instincts until graduation. Without guidance, the kids mangle this period of their lives: Melchior rapes Wendla (in the musical, she consents), Ilse (Steffi D) runs off to become the lover of a number of artists in a Bohemian colony, and Moritz kills himself.

"'The bitch of living'

Clearly, nothing changes in adolescence. I only wish someone other than composer Duncan Sheik had attempted to write this musical 40 years ago. Steven Sater's book stays faithful to the original German text and his lyrics capture the exacerbated emotions of adolescence (albeit with intentional overly dramatic simplicity): Ranting about their exploding sex drives, Moritz and Melchior call it "the bitch of living" after "seeing God is dead."

Sater's lyrics in Totally Fucked capture the teenage runaways' sublimated longing to conform by disappearing "just long enough…to get out of this." But Sheik's melodic, straightforward music displays no similar invention (even if he did win a Tony for Best Score).

Sheik's music pulses with anger and despair and longing, but the production design renders it too poppy. Bill T. Jones's synchronized boy-band choreography and Michael Mayer's direction turn these groups of boys and girls into stylized versions of boy (or girl) bands—complete with the weird one, the leader, the dorky girl, the too-tall stringbean, the wallflower, etc.

Sadder than mere beatings

However, the music occasionally intensifies the story line to clench us by the heart and throat. Sarah Hunt's haunting singing as Martha in The Dark I Know Well makes her sad moments of sexual abuse much sadder than the mere beatings Martha received in Wedekind's play; and Ilse's song, Blue Wind, reveals the purgatory of unbridled hedonism.

I loved the percussion innovations—keyboardist Jared Stein's pant-legs seemingly had their own microphone for the moments he slapped his thigh— but every song plays like either a rock anthem or ballad. And while Kevin Adams' lighting design achieves an erotically eerie effect with dangling blue light bulbs, his rock-concert instinct to throw the entire stage into darkness at the end of every song quickly grows tiresome.

Why bring teens?

If so little has changed in the hundred-plus years since Wedekind wrote his play and these tragedies of youth still unfold, can art then teach us nothing, offer no understanding? Should we do as Plato requires, and ban the poets for moral reasons?

Given the number of teens in attendance, a real question remains: Is there any value in letting kids of this age watch unseemly resolutions to their problems in art? To echo the Inquirer critic Wendy Rosenfield (in her blog): "What kind of a moron would bring their little kid to see a show like that?"

In the Politics, Aristotle suggests a possible answer: "Emotions that strongly affect some souls are present in all to a varying degree… and… under the influence of religious music and songs that drive the soul to frenzy, they calm down [afterward] as if they had been medically treated and purged."

That is, confused and emotional people— i.e., teenagers— will feel better after being driven to tears watching similar experiences presented tragically, and perhaps they'll see their own sorrow in a different, milder light.

As for those of us who've survived those years of tortured change? I pitied Melchior's folly in thinking he knows everything, but I also envied his utterly naÓ¯ve and impractical hope for a better world ahead. You never want your kids to experience any of this, but they will. And even at a hundred bucks a pop, the tickets are still cheaper than therapy.â—†


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.