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by Frank Wedekind, translated by Francis J. Ziegler, adapted & directed by Paolo Santalucia

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

September 18–October 18, 2026

Melchior: “To myself I am the most contemptible creature in the universe”

The first Soulpepper season programmed by new Artistic Director Paolo Sanatlucia has started with a bang. Santalucia’s production of Spring Awakening is simply sensational. One might think that Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play about adolescents’ first discovery of sex would be sorely out of date by now, but Santalucia’s stylish adaptation proves that the play is as powerful and relevant as ever. Strong acting and insightful design combine to make the play a riveting experience.

If you mention Spring Awakening to many people, they will first think of the 2006 musical of that title by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater. The musical is based on Wedekind’s play, and it should not be surprising that the play is much more detailed and complex than the musical. Frühlings Erwachen (the play’s title in the original German) has been controversial since the very beginning. Wedekind had to publish the work at his own expense in 1891 since no one would touch it. The play was not staged in Germany until 1906. Its first English-language production in New York in 1917 was shut down after only performance after the New York City Commissioner of Licenses deemed it pornographic. From that time to the present the play has frequently been banned or heavily censored. Indeed, the play’s frank depiction of adolescents’ realization of changes in their bodies, of sex, masturbation, hetero- and homosexuality, not to mention masochism, child abuse and suicide would prevent it from being performed in many parts of the world including North America.

The play focuses on the lives of three main characters all about age fourteen. One is Melchior Gabor, who already proclaims himself an atheist, the only child in his school who knows about sexual intercourse because of forbidden books and pictures he has seen. Another is Melchior’s best friend Moritz Stiefel, who doesn’t understand the strange new feelings he is experiencing to the point that he can’t concentrate in school. To help Moritz, Melchior writes and illustrates an essay for Moritz about the facts of life. When this essay is later discovered, Melchior is expelled. What he asks the cruel Headmaster could be the motto for the entire play: “How can what is true be forbidden?”

The third character is Wendla Bergmann. She and all the other girls of her age do not attend the same school as the boys, but rather Höhere Mädchenschulen, whose explicit goal was to prepare the girls to be housewives. (In the year Wedekind wrote the play, the German parliament turned down a petition to allow women to enter university, a position reversed only in 1900.) As a consequence, Wendla knows nothing about biology and is still told that the stork visits her married sister with babies. When Wendla begs her mother to tell her the truth, her mother only says that only women who are married can have babies. This means Wendla is totally unprepared for what happens to her body after she has sex with Melchior. Wendla also doesn’t understand what the doctor that her mother has engaged is trying to do.

Director Paolo Santalucia has used the first translation of Wedekind’s play into English undertaken by Francis J. Ziegler in 1909. Santalucia has thoughtfully updated the antiquated language of Ziegler’s translation so that the dialogue sounds colloquial but not so modern that it doesn’t fit into the world of 1891. Santalucia has kept 21 of Wedekind’s 33 characters and has these roles assigned to 15 actors. Santalucia has primarily got rid of Wedekind’s many adult characters so that the play more clearly focusses on the children, which is quite appropriate since Wedekind’s subtitle is “Eine Kindertragödie” (“A Children’s Tragedy”).

Santalucia has made a few key changes. The first scene of a Latin class led by the ruthless professor Knochenbrüch, a scene presented entirely in Latin, is written by Santalucia himself. The scene immediately introduces the brutal world that the male children inhabit. The following scene of Mrs. Bergman dressing Wendla, the first scene of the play in Wedekind, thus shows us the restrictive world of the female children. At the end of the play Melchior is led off by a mysterious character known only as “Der vermummte Herr” (“The Disguised Man”). For this character Santalucia has substituted the vibrant character of Ilse, a young woman we meet earlier in the play, who has decided to live a life free of society’s rules. This gives the play a more positive ending than Wedekind’s, but one likely welcome after all the pain and distress we have witnessed.

More controversially, Santalucia has presented the sex scene between Melchior and Wendla not as rape as in the original but as consensual sex. Santalucia’s intention is likely to show Wendla’s awakening to sex in a positive light, that pleasure dimmed soon enough by her mother’s negative reaction.

As a director Santalucia has elicited passionate performances from his entire cast, ten of whom playing the “children”, are making their Soulpepper debuts. Jake Bunyan invests the rebel Melchior with nervous energy though Bunyan should do this without speaking his lines so quickly. Bunyan gives us a teenager who is quite willing to espouse his radical ideas in private while fully aware he could never utter them in the hearing of any adult. This is a world where Goethe’s masterpiece Faust is off-limits because it features sex out of wedlock. Bunyan’s best scenes are toward the end when all of Melchior’s bravado has been knocked out him and he is willing to die.

Olivia Neary-Hatton well captures the complete innocence of Wendla as well as Wendla’s growing awareness that important knowledge is being kept from her. Neary-Hatton’s unmodulated voice does make Wendla sound like a child though her unvarying tone does become wearing over time. Luckily, she drops this when Wendla is on her sickbed after her encounter with Melchior and confronts her mother about what is happening.

Noah Beemer and Justin Eddy as Hansy and Ernst make a playful gay couple, who, paradoxically for the time form the only happy relationship in the play. Wedekind’s audience would, of course, know how short-lived that happiness will be if ever discovered.

Anaka Maharaj-Sandhu makes the “immoral” Ilse feel like a breath of fresh air in world so many children perceive as a prison. Unlike Melchior, Ilse can afford to live by her radical beliefs because, as a woman, she knows she does not have a future she cares about. Maharaj-Sandhu’s Ilse radiates a warmth that comes from a freedom and joy in living that no other character possesses.

While all the young cast members are excellent in their roles, one performance stands out from all the others. That is the tremendous performance of Jake Cohen as Moritz. In Act 1 Cohen plays Moritz as an intense neurotic, whose ignorance about the facts of life and whose bliss when he reads Melchior’s essay are equally comic. Subtly, Cohen is able to shift Moritz’s intensity from a comic to a tragic tone. By Act 2 Moritz’s bliss has turned to despair and he contemplates shooting himself. Cohen brilliantly delivers Moritz’s long monologue, revolver in hand, revealing the depth of Moritz’s confusion. It is funny, sad, foolish and frightening all at once. Cohen is so convincing that I often could not look at the stage, afraid Moritz would commit the act right in front of us.

In Wedekind all of the adults are written as caricatures to contrast with the complexity of the children. In the present production, Santalucia allows only Daren A. Herbert to play Headmaster Hart-Brand (“Sonnenstich”, i.e., “sunstroke” in the original) and the Doctor in this way, as if the highest ranking adult and the healer were also the most crazed characters in the play.

Diego Matamoros plays the boys’ Professor Knochenbrüch (meaning “bone-break”) as a rigid, maleficent figure who seems to smile at the chance to punish a rule-breaker. As Melchior’s mother, Raquel Duffy is well-meaning but ultimately severe. In Santalucia’s adaptation only Wendla’s mother of all the adults is even moderately sympathetic. Liisa Repo-Martell makes her story to Wendla of how babies are born almost comic in its circumvention of the truth except that this tale will later have serious consequences. At least, Repo-Martell is able to show that Wendla’s mother can temper her anger with remorse.

Santalucia’s production would already be remarkable for its keen insight. As it happens the physical production only reinforces those insights in ways more common in opera than in spoken theatre. Shannon Lea Doyle has designed an ingenious set of five walls, four of which initially seem to serve merely as legs for the empty playing are, bare to the back wall of the stage. In Act 3, the five jagged-edged segments are joined together to form a wall as if the world of the children has indeed become a prison or as if adults have deliberately walled off essential knowledge from their offspring.

At the same time lighting designer Kevin Lamotte plays with backlighting the performers to turn them into silhouettes or in frontlighting them to create shadows on the wall. In both cases the lighting erases the characters’ individual features just as societal and instructional rules make no exception for anyone. Thomas Ryder Payne’s ominous soundscape only heightens the already disturbing nature of the action.

Like the best productions of Soulpepper’s earliest days, Santalucia’s Spring Awakening demonstrates that there is a reason why classic plays are classic. They have an inherent power which needs only a director’s insight into the text to unleash, not a director’s concept to restrain. If this is the direction that Santalucia is taking Soulpepper, it bodes very well for the future.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Olivia Neary-Hatton as Wendell and Jake Bunyan as Melchior; Diego Matamoros as Professor Knochenbrüch and the boys; Noah Beemer as Hansy and Justin Eddy as Ernst; Jake Cohen as Moritz. © 2026 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: soulpepper.ca.