"Spring Awakening' at the Academy of Music (1st review)

Spring Awakening, the Broadway musical that visited the Academy of Music last week, arrived trailing a slew of awards (including the Tony for Best New Musical of 2007) and successful engagements in other countries. But it's an emperor without clothes.

This staging amounts to a cartoon version of Frank Wedekind's landmark play about the emergence of adolescents from repression in the Germany of the 1890s. Their frustrations and agonies are glossed over in favor of laugh lines and caricatures. The acting is often excellent, so the blame must lie with Steven Sater, who wrote the book and lyrics, and director Michael Mayer.

Their intent is epitomized by the T-shirts prominently on display in the lobby, which say "You're Fucked." Such language is used for shock effect throughout the play, especially in a song with that title and in "The Bitch of Living." (I don't object to the words, just to the gratuitous way they're thrown around.) The audience responds to the cues, and every mention of the words penis or vagina elicits laughter. "Genitalia?" Loud guffaws.

I don't blame the audience. I subscribe to the old axiom that audiences (on the whole) are never wrong. It's the presentation on stage that elicits audience behavior. A scene where a boy masturbates is exaggerated for laughs, and repeatedly the boy's feelings are held up for ridicule.

My teenage son's perspective

Some observers might argue that you have to be young to appreciate this show. But my 15-year-old son characterized the show as gross— playing for cheap laughs— and the music as "boring." (To put this in perspective, his favorite shows include In the Heights and Rent.)

I actually liked the score more than my son did. Songs are used as soliloquies. The dialogue proceeds up to a point; then the actor pulls a microphone from his pocket and starts to sing as the stage lighting changes. The singer reveals his internal thoughts, then puts the mike away, turns back to the other characters and interaction resumes. Artificial, yes, but effective.

Needed: A course in musical form

Duncan Sheik's rock songs are OK, similar to his compositions that you often hear on WXPN. His slow songs are more distinctive. Some of them are lovely and have been subtly orchestrated by the composer for a small ensemble that includes a cello and a string bass. These songs are expressively melancholy and make modulations into minor key.

On the other hand, most of them present a short melody and repeat it without any development or expansion. The songwriter would have profited from reading Dan Coren's series on musical form, especially his essays on development and recapitulation, which show how composers created tension that's released in delayed and well-prepared returns to the original melody of the song, sonata or symphony. In Spring Awakening, tunes go nowhere and end abruptly. Next to Sheik, Rent's composer Jonathan Larson was Johann Sebastian Bach.

Shades of Lang Lang

Kyle Riabko is superb as Melchior, the intellectual teenager who is expelled from school for writing a sexually explicit and atheistic document. Blake Bashoff is effective as Moritz, a confused lad who is driven to suicide, although he overplays his eccentricities. The rest of the cast acts competently and sings very well.

Jared Stein is a hyper-kinetic pianist and leader of the on-stage band. His repeated slapping of his thighs and flailing of his legs make Lang Lang seem like an introvert by comparison. This hyperactivity distracts from the actors on stage.

High bricks walls overshadow a simple platform, with some audience members seated on the stage. This intimacy worked when the show played a tiny space off-Broadway, but it seems gratuitous in the Academy's cavernous space. An extension of the stage into the house would create more involvement, and so would a reduction of the playing area, bringing the back of the set more forward. This apparently can't be done because the production needs space for some flamboyantly athletic choreography.

EgoPo did it better

Between the cheap laughs, a sketchy picture emerges of high school kids whose parents and religious leaders keep them in ignorance about sex and chastise them for expressing feelings and for questioning their elders. The original Wedekind play presents a large cast whose actors get involved in masochism, sex and impiety and receive disproportional punishment. It's a tragedy overloaded with incidents that can benefit from some pruning, but this version goes much too far in over-simplification. In contrast, EgoPo's production of the straight play in 2007 was more evocative of period and more touching.â—†


To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.