Review- Spring Awakening

The nervous titters and giggles bounced around the Uihlein Hall audience last night like beach balls at a Jimmy Buffet concert. The very un-Broadway musical, Spring Awakening, opened the Marcus Center’s Broadway series, bringing in a much younger than usual crowd, eager for both the songs and the sex. But like Rent, which will play two different major stages in Milwaukee this season, Spring’s radical reworking of the Broadway formula represents the musical’s future—a cold slap in the face to those who want to see revivals of South Pacific or Oklahoma! for decades to come.
Both those shows were notable to tackling “social issues.” And Spring Awakening isn’t shy about that. Based on a notorious turn-of-the-19th-century play by Frank Wedekind, the story explores the sexual awakenings of students and the social mores that threaten their free spirits. As such, the characters grapple with hetero and homosexual desire, masturbation, rape, incest, abortion, and sado-masochistic impulses. Did I mention that the characters are all fourteen years old?
So the giggles are perhaps understandable, even if undeserved. Spring Awakening handles its subjects with a generous spirit and serious intent. Wedekind was a rock ‘n’ roll rebel of a playwright (he also wrote Lulu, a gripping portrait of raw sexual desire that’s been revived, adapted and filmed often), and Steven Sater’s book and lyrics preserves the core of the rebellion, while Duncan Sheik’s emo/folk-rock music gives it a foot-stomping urgency and a dreamy, soaring sense of possibility.
It’s a show that gains much of its power from the direct intimacy of its songs, but it sits well in Uihlein Hall, which is more than twice as large as the Broadway theater that housed it for over two years. Michael Mayer’s spare staging keeps the focus on the characters, and the actors do a great job of fleshing them out with short, impressionist scenes. And the dynamic musical numbers keep the energy level high. The one misplaced element of the show was Bill T. Jones’s somewhat precious choreography. He moved people around the stage well, and gave them the chance for several moments of anthemic fist-pumping. But the main motif of his choreography—a very modernist looking self-directed feel up—that didn’t fit with Mayer’s style.