Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✭✩
music by Duncan Sheik, book and lyrics by Steven Sater, directed by Michael Mayer
Mirvish Productions, Canon Theatre, Toronto
March 18-April 19, 2009
When German playwright Frank Wedekind wrote Spring Awakening in 1891, he deliberately wanted to raise topics on stage that society refused to acknowledge much less discuss--like child abuse, abortion, suicide, sexual fantasies, homosexuality, sadomasochism and masturbation--all among newly post-pubescent children in a small provincial town. It’s no wonder, then, that the play, when not banned outright, was produced in censored form into the 1960s. Now it is a Tony-winning musical with a gorgeous score by Duncan Sheik and exciting, non-naturalistic staging by Michael Mayer completely atypical for a Broadway musical.
The problem is that the score is really too gorgeous for the material. The overall tone of Sheik’s music is pastoral and elegiac, rather like Goldfrapp’s Seventh Tree album last year, only briefly acquiring the kind of bite the material demands in the songs “The Bitch of Living” and the now famous “Totally Fucked.” It’s as if Sheik and Sater, contrary to the source, intentionally want to tone down the volatility of the themes. Indeed, in Wedekind the atheist central figure Melchior (Matt Doyle) rapes the sexually ignorant Wendla (Christy Altomare), whereas in the musical their sex is consensual, thus making Melchior’s character significantly less complex. After learning of the deaths of two teens, the exile of two others and misery of the rest under what the rebel Melchior calls the “parentocracy,” it seems perverse to conclude the show with the upbeat hymn “The Song of Purple Summer” that glosses over all the unresolved emotions the piece raises.
All of the young singers are also excellent actors. Altomare and Doyle have particularly fine voices, but so do Blake Bashoff as Moritz and Steffi D as Ilse. Mayer’s staging is a compendium of Brecht’s so-called “alienation effects.” The band is on stage in full view and the acting platform has an on-stage audience on two sides. We are constantly aware that we are watching actors performing an older play. Though costumed in 19th-century togs, the actors pull out handheld mics when they sing. Kevin Adams’s lighting shifts drastically to separate the songs from rather than integrate them into the dialogue. Two actors, Angela Reed and Henry Stram, play all the repressive adults in the show, varying from realistic to grotesquely over-the-top. What impresses more than the once-shocking subject matter and Sheik’s languorous score is Mayer’s inexhaustible invention and the white-hot talent of the young performers who make it work.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-03-19.
Photo: Men of Spring Awakening. ©Paul Kolnik.
2009-03-19
Spring Awakening