Soulpepper’s 2026/27 season begins this September with Paolo Santalucia’s first production as Artistic Director: a new staging and adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s blistering landmark play, SPRING AWAKENING, with Associate Direction by Soulpepper Associate Artistic Director Luke Reece, on stage September 10th to October 4th.

One of the foundational works of modern theatre—and the play that inspired the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical phenomenon—SPRING AWAKENING is a fierce and haunting coming-of-age story about young people on the threshold of adulthood—pushing back against repression, demanding truth, and struggling to claim agency in a world determined to deny it. Romantic, restless, and full of desire, Wedekind’s characters reach for love before they have the language to understand it, aching for connection as silence and misinformation propel them toward consequences that cannot be undone.

Santalucia’s production brings together a dynamic multigenerational cast, featuring some of Canada’s most exciting next-generation talent. The cast includes incoming Soulpepper Academy artists Noah Beemer, Jake Bunyan, Jasmine Case, Anaka Maharaj-Sandhu, and Olivia Neary-Hatton, alongside EJ Candelaria, Jake Cohen, Justin Eddy, Raylene Harewood, Eric Miracle and Mackenzie Wojcik. They are joined by Soulpepper veterans Raquel Duffy, Daren A. Herbert, Diego Matamoros and Liisa Repo-Martell.

“I chose SPRING AWAKENING because it is one of my favourite plays ever written, but also because it asks one of the most urgent questions of our time: how do we bring young people into a world that those of us responsible for guiding them understand less and less?” says Santalucia. “We are living through a profound change in how we encounter information, form our identities, and understand one another. The tragedy of the play begins when adults mistake authority for knowledge—when they withhold truth instead of trusting young people with it.

“What makes the play hopeful to me is its belief that young people are often the first to understand and adapt to the changes reshaping their lives. If we want to steer the future toward optimism, we have to trust that they know as much as we do—and often more—about who they are and what they need. Our responsibility is not to steer them toward the world we remember, but to listen, equip them with truth, and give them the agency to shape the world that is coming. That faith is at the heart of this production, and of Soulpepper’s commitment to the next generation of artists through the Soulpepper Academy.”

Written in 1891, before adolescence was widely recognized as a distinct stage of life, SPRING AWAKENING was banned and censored for years because of its radical honesty about young people’s inner lives and its frank examination of adolescent sexuality. With the benefit of hindsight, Wedekind’s authoritarian fin-de-siècle world feels startlingly prophetic: adults control access to information, regulate young people through shame and cause lasting harm by refusing them the truth.

The play was first publicly staged more than 15 years after it was written, premiering in November 1906 at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin under the direction of Max Reinhardt. Its treatment of puberty, sexuality, sexual violence, pregnancy and abortion has led to repeated censorship. The first English-language production was staged in New York City in 1917; when the city’s Commissioner of Licenses sought to close it as pornographic, a New York trial court granted an injunction allowing the production to proceed.

SPRING AWAKENING reached a new generation when a musical adaptation premiered off-Broadway in 2006, transferred to Broadway, and won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

Joining Santalucia are Associate Director Luke Reece, Set Designer Shannon Lea Doyle, Costume Designer Ming Wong 黄慧明, Lighting Designer Kevin Lamotte, Sound Designer Thomas Ryder Payne and Fight and Intimacy Director Casey Hudecki.

SPRING AWAKENING runs at Soulpepper Theatre from September 10 to October 4, with Opening Night. Visit soulpepper.ca for performance dates and times.