Theatre I should not be laughing at the graveside scene.
I saw this in London and it was BAD. The story was ok, but has no pace and then everyone dies. But that was not the problem. The problem was the acting, some of the scenes and choreography.
The play has two adult actors for all of the adult characters and these two where really, really good, particularly seeing as they have to deal with so many characters, but the teenage actors where pathetic. The male lead was the understudy and he spent the latter scenes biting huge chunks from the scenery. The female lead was just flat and wet. The, supposedly epic and uplifting ending, almost made me laugh, a real challenge for a scene of a man by his love's graveside.
As for the scenes, there really are only the two that are a problem. First the scene with the gay couple, played for laughs, a pair of camp gay characters in a tragic play who's overall theme I have later learned is child abuse. Clearly it was originally in the play as a "gay is evil" bit and was altered, badly, to avoid offence. Second, and worse, is the throw away scene of the girl who is abused by her father. A single song, and it is never mentioned again. Using the fact a father rapes his own daughter to do little more than allow for a scene change is NOT GOOD.
Finally, the choreography. Oh dear lord. Passing over the fact that the mother's slap of the female lead was a real slap and thus common assault under UK law and the huge amounts of pointless blinky tat, showy lighting and needless mess, including a bit where the male lead drifts by on a chair attached to the far wall in a scene that has nothing AT ALL to do with him. Ignore all that. I call director getting over exited at his new toys, it happens. But there are worse, much worse. For some reason the sex scene, logically a scene where you want to drive home the geographical and rapidly growing emotional isolation of the lead characters from their piers, all of the other children sit around the elevated platform and then rocked it back and forth to the point where one of them almost got hit in the teeth with it!. And I don't even want to remember the fight choreography.
My girlfriend's sister, a professional dancer and thus a person I trust to know, says that the Broadway version is better. Perhaps they had a bad night but I would NEVER recommend this.
Theatre What was the point?!
I saw Spring Awakening with my ex-girlfriend, and we came into it with very few expectations, knowing virtually nothing about the story, characters or style of it except that it was popular. While the performances themselves were very good we had fun tearing the story apart over dinner. We're both writers, so the plot inconsistencies bugged us too much, and neither of us could hum a single song when it was over. When we asked ourselves "When did we get to High School Musical?" it was a bad sign.
The first act on its own is good enough, it sets up a bunch of plot threads and builds us up to the two main characters having sex. Fine enough. But other than the pregnancy there was no real development that came from it in the characters themselves, they're just accessories to the plot. Likewise, the other plot threads like the girls who were abused by their fathers and the gay couple got one song and then were forgotten about with no closure. The entire second act seemed to just rush towards the finish, and when the curtain finally dropped we had no idea what to take from it.
Furthermore, the whole thing seemed to shoot its own moral in the foot. So parents shelter their kids from sexual topics and dislike it when their kids fool around, which just tempts them further. Fine, simple enough message. But when the kids then get themselves into huge trouble because they do things without thinking with their brains (though the guys were obviously thinking with something else) we're supposed to side with the kids? When two of them die? Huh?
We both had trouble relating to and liking Melchior since he just seemed like a pompous asshole, and the sex scene was uncomfortably close to a rape for both of us since she told him to stop at one point. The sex scene (which we saw twice!) was just uncomfortable, I would have liked it if they'd just cut to black on it, but we saw the whole thing. Melchior in general didn't endear himself to us, he seemed like a whiny self-entitled little shit who banked far too much on being "edgy". In fact, that was our general problem with the play. It presented itself as being edgy, but it fell into the same cliches and played them totally straight, so we walked out of there wondering where two and a half hours had gone and just what the point of it all was.
But most of all, we were disappointed by the lack of lesbians.
Theatre As [title of show]'s Hunter Bell once said: it makes me feel feelings
Spring Awakening has been my favorite musical for several years now. I've seen it several times and am already making plans to see it again. Allow me to try and explain why I continue to be so obsessed.
A lot of people have seen the modern relevance of Wedekind's 1891 play and have sought to highlight it (and fix some of the values dissonance) by adapting it into modern times. The musical is interesting because it's the only adaption, or one of few, that decided to add a modern twist *without* changing the time period. As a result, the characters go about a tweaked version of the original story but with the addition of modern music which, unlike traditional musicals, functions more like inner monologues or fantasy sequences. (And if you like the sort of alt-/pop-rock of Duncan Sheik it's REALLY GOOD music.)
Even if the story is relatively straightforward, I still keep discovering new things within its presentation. Some of the songs bring a lot of symbolism to digest, the set seems minimal yet is full of detail (when I sat on stage once I was in awe of all the things hanging on those walls and would've loved to look longer and take in various trinkets' significance), and as is the nature of live theater there are always new actors bringing little shifts in interpretation (and awesome voices — several cast members have gone on to much bigger things, most infamously Glee).
The sexuality is often hyped (after all, Sex Sells...) but I think overall it's more about... loss of innocence. Growing up and beginning to see from an adult perspective how dark life can sometimes be — going through sexual or religious or other confusion, experiencing failure, mourning, dealing with one's own abuse or realizing how many people around you are abused. Without preaching, Spring Awakening shows how these experiences are nearly universal across cultures and times. For me, even in discussing things we *don't* like about the show it's spawned many conversations between my friends and family about things important or sensitive to us that we might not have otherwise discussed. On a less heavy note, the show also entertains me and makes me laugh and have hope.
If you enjoy coming of age stories, quirky-but-not-too-quirky theater, and/or musicals with contemporary scores, it's worth seeing this musical if it comes your way.