Spring Awakening

"Oh, I'm gonna be wounded.
Oh, I'm gonna be your wound.
Oh, I'm gonna bruise you.
Oh, you're gonna be my bruise."

I know, those sound like lyrics from an emo song, yes? Well, surprise, they're not. They come from a pivotal scene in the "new hot" musical, Spring Awakening, which I was fortunate enough to see during my sojourn to New York City. New is certainly accurate. Hot is certainly accurate as well. And though you may emerge from the show thinking: "Gee, the topics covered--underage sex, unplanned pregnancy, suicide, abortion, etc.--are sort of pedestrian and Lifetimey nowadays," one must remember that the musical is based on a play. That was written in Germany. In 1891. Before sex was even invented.

Spring Awakening was considered so obscene that it was fifteen years before it was even released, and now it has been transformed into a Broadway musical. Thankfully they kept the time and place intact. We are still in Germany, in 1891, in a small town where boys are strictly schooled at a Protestant-Lutheran-Fire and Brimstone institution and girls are expected to play with dolls. However, the boys and girls are slowly becoming men and women, and their ignorance of the ways of the birds and the bees leads to certain disastrous consequences.

What must be emphasized is the absolute beauty of the show's depiction of adolescent, awakening sexuality. The end of act one, a pivotal scene involving two of the main characters, is presented so magically that I practically lost my breath. There is no cringing from what sex is--fear and exhilaration, pleasure and pain, masturbation and masochism. In one scene, a girl asks a boy to beat her. Back-to-back songs about masturbation (some of the best ever written, in my humble opinion, and these in an overall excellent indie-rock score by the one-hit-wonder Duncan Sheik) are accompanied by enactments onstage. The choreography is writhing, explosive, and when the characters break into song--an unveiling of their hyper-repressed, sexualized inner monologues--the music is accompanied by a fantastic neon rock and roll light show. In this show, sex is truly equated with rock and roll, and the results are wondrous.

The production works best as a whole, as the plot material is fairly predictable, and--save for the three main characters and a rather fantastic homosexual Casanova--the cast blends into a group of pretty young things. But the show overall was so utterly exhilarating that one has to overlook its extraordinarily few faults and embrace the fact that sex and rock and roll is here and now on Broadway. Spring Awakening is a fantastic production about the essential "bitch of living," and if you're hanging about in New York City anytime soon I highly, highly, highly recommend it.