Spring Awakening is the Tony Award winning rock musical about coming of age, teenage sexual desires, parental/adolescent communication, and teenager raising/discipline. Although the show opened on Broadway in 2006 and the music is contemporary, the story is from a late nineteenth century German play—a play which was banned at the time in Germany.
The show premiered on Broadway on December 10, 2006 and closed on January 18, 2009 after 888 performances. It won the 2007 Tony Awards for best musical, best direction, best book, best score, and best featured actor. It also won, among many other accolades, four Drama Desk Awards. The presentation at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, OCPAC, is the 2009 national touring company.
The story is based on the controversial 1891 German play of the same title by Frank Wedekind. It was banned in Germany because of a long list of provocative scenes. The Music is by Duncan Sheik, with book and Lyrics by Steven Sater.
Although the rape scene in the original play became consensual for the musical, the current show includes enough explicit material to garner the following warning from OCPA’s web site: “Be Aware--Spring Awakening is a powerful coming of age story with mature themes: sexual situations, partial nudity and strong language.”
Set late in the nineteenth century, Spring Awakening tells the story of a group of teenagers in a German provincial town. They struggle against overly authoritarian school teachers, parental abuse, emerging sexual drives, adults who will not tell the girls the facts of life, abortion, first love, and teen suicide, just to name a few.
According to Roxanne, a 2000 Los Alamitos High School graduate who saw Spring Awakening on Wednesday, “By looking around at the Spring Awakening audience, it looked like there were a lot of teenagers at the show and they really seemed to be taken by it. It made me think about the way, when I was in theater at Los Al, how all the theater students were really caught up in the show Rent because it was radical at the time and it spoke to us about the challenges we were facing. Spring Awakening is similar—it’s poignant, strong, and radical. Even though the show is set in an earlier time, the issues faced by the teenagers in the show are very similar to the things today’s young people must deal with.”
She indicated that the actors used hand held mics for the songs, even though they were wearing body mics. For Roxanne, this switching on and off to the hand held mics was a distraction.
Esther, another Los Alamitos High School graduate who saw the show with Roxanne said “With all the German names, it was really hard to remember who was who, but the rock songs were really captivating.” She indicated that all the adults were played by the same two male and female actors, and this made following the story a bit difficult.
Esther was really grabbed by the authentic contemporary nature of the rock music. She said “I thought the rock songs were great. If some of those songs were on KIIS FM, I’d have been, like, oh, cool song, they were that mainstream. They were like full on rock songs that you hear on the radio, not “Broadway rock songs”.
Spring Awakening
11/17/2009 - 11/29/2009
Segerstrom Hall
Orange County Performing Arts Center
Tickets start at $20.00
Talk Backs - Post-Performance Discussions* With Members of the Spring Awakening Cast, Tuesday, November 24
With authorities on parent/teen communication facilitated by Center President Terry Dwyer, Saturday, November 21 (Matinee)
*Ticket to Spring Awakening performance required.
ASL interpreted on November 28 at 2pm
Click here to go to the official web site.
