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'Spring Awakening,' 'Equus,' '13' spotlight teens

Linda Winer | Critical Mass

October 5, 2008

Coming-of-age stories have long been a favorite in books and Hollywood. On Broadway these days, however, the casting of real teens spills the drama of pubescence beyond the illusory edges of the stage.

I'm not talking about "Annie and Simba Get School Spirit."

It has been almost two years since a cast of genuine teenagers pushed the comfort margins of the commercial musical with "Spring Awakening," the daring primal scream of turbulent puberty that won all the big Tony Awards and, with its newest young cast, remains every bit as daring a hit today. The exhilarating rock musical explores suicide, abortion, incest and masturbation within the framework of the repressed provincial Germany described so scandalously in 1891 by pioneering pre-Expressionist playwright Frank Wedekind.

The lighter side of young angst opens at the Jacobs Theatre tonight in "13," described in its publicity as "the only all-teenage cast ever to hit Broadway." ("Spring Awakening" has two all-purpose adults.) Jason Robert Brown, who won a Tony Award 11 years ago for his moving score for "Parade," has written a show about a happy New York kid whose parents divorce and who gets uprooted to live in small-town Indiana with his mom.

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Obviously, this is meant to be more innocuous than "Spring Awakening." But the show has real tweens singing about the real embarrassments of fictional tweens, including the sudden appearance of body hair and the curiosity about kisses that involve "getting tongue." Nobody in the band, which performs onstage, is over 17. So is there an ick-factor here, a live-on-stage extension of reality-TV voyeurism? Or has the success of the kid-driven "High School Musical" made it laughable to try to pass young-looking adults as real children? (Please, the students at Rydell High in the current revival of "Grease" look 40 years old.)

Clearly, family entertainment is growing up on Broadway. After enthralling tots with Disney fairy tales, the theater is following the demographics to young adults and consenting parental units with discretionary income. "Billy Elliot," the smash London adaptation of the film about a working-class boy who dares to want to be a ballet dancer, will alternate three kids, ages 13 and 14, in the challenging title role.

Then there is the double image of celebrity child actors as they morph into mature characters. Haley Joel Osment, the sweet 11-year-old who famously claimed "I see dead people" in the spooky 1999 movie "Sixth Sense," will be uttering much tougher stuff next month in "American Buffalo," the revival of David Mamet's 1975 poetic dirty-talk breakthrough about three guys and a petty heist.

And the elephant in the room, of course, is Daniel Radcliffe. Although now and perhaps forever to be identified as Harry Potter, the actor is making his remarkable Broadway debut in the current revival of Peter Shaffer's "Equus." Radcliffe, 19, plays Alan Strang, the unstable 17-year-old stable boy who worships, eroticizes and eventually blinds six horses. As everyone must know by now, the actor also has an extended nude scene. It may be tempting to mistake this for kiddie porn, the juxtaposition of iconic child wizard and real flesh. The real daring, however, is the emotional nakedness of Radcliffe's wrenching performance.

Apropos of juxtaposition, the producer of "Spring Awakening" is Tom Hulce - the actor who understudied and then succeeded Peter Firth, the original stable boy, on Broadway in the mid-'70s. Hulce, in London casting for the Brit premiere of "Spring Awakening," said last week in a phone interview that he occasionally looks at the Broadway actors and thinks, "'Oh my God, they're so young.' Then I remember that I was onstage at that age taking my clothes off in 'Equus.'"

Hulce has been with composer Duncan Sheik and author-lyricist Steven Sater through most of the many developmental years of "Spring Awakening" on its improbable journey to a mainstream hit (with a road company now in San Francisco and productions planned for Germany and Japan). Many of the actors who opened on Broadway were also in those early workshops, which means some were as young as 14 when they began a show in which they had to really touch themselves and one another while playing 19th century fictional characters.

By the time the show opened on Broadway in December 2006, many of the young actors didn't look as childlike as they had the previous summer Off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theatre. I remember thinking that this unavoidable fact of nature - the growth spurt - made the adventure feel less dangerous. But their relative maturity may have put audiences more at ease.

The new cast is again quite young; two are 17, one is 16. It is also again wonderful. Hunter Parrish, 21, who has grown up on Showtime's "Weeds" as Mary-Louise Parker's older son, makes a stirring, understated Broadway debut as Melchior, the town's golden boy.

Hulce says that actors under 18 are rarely in scenes with sexual content. He says there has been remarkably little shock about the explicitness. "Given the material," he insists, "to do less than we are doing would feel coy." He says young actors appreciate the chance "to be part of a story where their concerns are being taken seriously and not trivialized." Despite the squirm factor - and, yes, probably because of it - we appreciate them.