A daring, primal 'Awakening'

BY LINDA WINER | Newsday Staff Writer

December 11, 2006

"Spring Awakening" did not merely open at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre last night. The action was more like ripping open, more like breaking out, more like tearing into the pretend pop and reused plots that pass for new musicals on Broadway today.

When this primal scream of turbulent puberty had its premiere Off-Broadway last summer at the Atlantic Theater Company, market indicators hoped for a youth magnet on the commercial coattails of "Rent" or "The Who's Tommy." In fact, this daring and exhilarating entertainment doesn't look like anything - nor do Duncan Sheik's songs sound like anything - invited yet to live in the same esthetic or economic world of "American Idol" screamers and ironic-comedy spoofs.

Can such furious, serious fun exist on kill-for-a-ticket Broadway? Better question: can Broadway move ahead without acknowledging and embracing it?

More drama-with-music than conventional musical, "Spring Awakening" takes place in the repressed provincial Germany described so scandalously by pioneering pre-Expressionist playwright Frank Wedekind in 1891. Lyricist and author Steven Sater maintains the oppressive era in this story of teens in a town beyond the reach of sex education, much less of Freud.

So, yes, the time is late 19th century, but the stirrings - incest, masturbation, suicide, abortion - are always timelessly modern. In Michael Mayer's lean and juicy production, a ripening young beauty named Wendla (Lea Michele) begs her mother to debunk the stork theory of conception. Standing on a wooden chair, bare thighs exposed between her chaste linen underwear and high woolen stockings, she foreshadows disaster by singing, angelically, "Mama who bore me / mama who gave me / no way to handle things / who made me so bad."

Have hand microphones ever been so theatrically used - almost as characters - to expose internal monologues? Wendla stays in her parents' idea of reality, while speaking. So do her equally confused girlfriends and the boys in their sex-segregated school. But when they sing - wham, when they sing - they reach into their shapeless dresses and into their rough woolen school uniforms, pull out their hand mikes and burst out from a world that cannot begin to contain the sexual energy.

The juxtaposition of style is a shock, no matter how many times Mayer uses the device. Singer-songwriter Sheik (best known for his hit song "Barely Breathing") has written brief, trenchant songs that refuse to rise to phony climaxes and are unafraid to be hushed. Sater's lyrics creep into the psyche as the youngsters sing, in contrasting contexts, "Oh, I'm gonna be wounded" while somehow also knowing, "You're gonna be my bruise."

Christine Estabrook and Stephen Spinella (both new since the Off-Broadway run) portray all the cruel, hypocritical and merely ignorant adults in bold, clear outlines.

But the story belongs to the young actors - some of whom, like the gifted Michele, have been with the show throughout its seven-year development. The performers don't even look as childlike as they did last summer - a fact of nature that may put theatergoers at ease but which takes some of the edge off the dangerous adventure.

Except for a terribly disappointing "let-the-sunshine-in-we-love-you-tomorrow" anthem of hopeful redemption at the end, the production has not betrayed its dark soul for Broadway consumption. Choreographer Bill T. Jones, the modern-dance master in his terrific Broadway debut, brings out both the creepy and romantic eroticism. When not stomping in formless frustration and climbing walls, the young people touch their bodies in a ritualized series of intimate explorations, as if they are trying to feel where they end and the world begins.

Jonathan Groff has an unforced authority as Melchoir, the cutest, smartest, most sensitive golden boy whose intelligence and innocence turn him into an exile. John Gallagher, Jr. has a tender, geeky pathos as Moritz, the misfit with punk-fantasy hair, who ultimately embodies the destruction of sexual and class intolerance.

Jonathan B. Wright has a delightful, leering sensual self-assurance as the gay classmate, whose masturbation scene (under a sheet) is wittily synched in split screen with the boy (Skylar Astin) having a libidinous fantasy during his piano lesson. Lilli Cooper has a stirring, understated agony as the abused child, while Lauren Pritchard seems just a bit too pleased with the results of having been thrown out of her parents' house.

The large open set - part classroom, part abyss - includes a sensitively amplified onstage band and some bleachers for theatergoers. Costumes, designed by Susan Hilferty, find the humanity beneath the formality. Lights, by Kevin Adams, hang low, one by one, as if radiant stars just might share the same space with the charged-up anguish below.

SPRING AWAKENING. Book and lyrics by Steven Sater, music by Duncan Sheik, directed by Michael Mayer with choreography by Bill T. Jones. Eugene O'Neill Theatre, 230 W. 49th St. Tickets: $31.25- $111.25. Call 212-239-6200. Seen at Friday's preview.