Spring Awakening is based on a play written in 1891 about the transition of adolescence to adulthood. The exploration of life goals, love, sexuality and all other things that the grown up world refused to discuss with their kids apart from issuing orders after orders. It has a strong sense of breaking through the cocoon of adolescence and thus the use of rock music throughout the whole production completely reflected this dying urge of the main cast. The opening song laid the foundation of the whole story in a mellow, desperate but sweet song. As the story progressed, you just got hooked to how such an ill trained bunch of kids reacted to all the catastrophes of adulthood they experienced.
The Sydney Theatre Company (STC) production commands a huge young cast together will well trained actors. The result is a refreshing production that is probably not to everyone’s taste. On the Saturday night that I attended, I was surrounded by a huge token STC patron group – Anglo middle to upper class baby boomers (as you can tell from their high end fashion and lack of command with their bunch of newly purchased iPhones and Blackberries). After the first act and the intermission, some of them disappeared. The remaining ones were talking about they had no idea what’s happening and wondered what’s with the rock music and hysteric performance of the cast. Of course the only reason the ones left were still there because “they paid for the ticket, might as well sit through it”.
If you judge by their reactions, you would probably think that it is a bad production. In fact it is not. What amused me was that their reactions were exactly the way the adult characters in the musical behaved throughout the whole story – they couldn’t understand and couldn’t be bothered to try to understand. “We have kids so we deal with them in a way we understand ourselves”. I am not saying the adults were portrayed as bad guys, they were just good guys with bad reactions to the events in the story. They couldn’t help it because that’s what they knew best and they had to stick with them to make things work for them.
The story has its setting in a small community with two groups of teenagers – one from an all boys school and the other from all girls school – trying to grow up and find out what it is about life and their position in the world. Heading these two groups were our three leads – Melchior (Andrew Hazzard), Moritz (Akos Armont) and Wendla (Clare Brown). As they experienced their own torment of growing up, they also confronted the mis-happenings and issues of their friends. The cast gave an electrifying performance as the growing teenagers, with most of them playing to their ages. The energy level was high and they performed professionally with some of the more daring and challenging scenes on stage. The singing and dancing looked quite demanding especially when the stage has quite limited space for them to manoeuvre around and it was slanting downward at an angle on the stage front. The numbers were well sung most of the time although at times you do hear broken notes – not that they were not reached, just not crisp enough. But all the ensemble numbers were so well done that they made you want to move along with them. Overall the cast gave a very good performance that kept your rhythm pumping.
Set design wise, it comprises of a huge mobile wooden and metal structure with lots of ladders. So as you would expect, there were a lot of climbing – and I mean a lot – and some of them were done in the dark. Even certain stage exits were above the stage level so actors did have to climb to exit stage. I am sure the stage design passed the OH&S check but you sometimes do sweat for the actors when they did have to climb the ladders quickly to exit from the scene. Lighting was used very smartly to help the structure to reflect different areas or scenarios in the community. They also helped to command some of the more confronting moments in the story.
The score is mainly rock music with a lot of ear catching tunes for the younger generation. So do not expect the more operatic style of singing and songs as exhibited in Phantom of the Opera. As mentioned before, the style of song did match with the theme of the musical perfectly and in fact it will be awkward to replace it with another style. There were some demanding moments, such as one of Moritz arias and considering that most songs were done together with a lot of electrical shot like and vigorous dance moves, they were a lot more demanding than they looked. The live band on stage behind the main stage area delivered a very moving score throughout the whole performance and it was great to see them on stage at the curtain call as without them the story wouldn’t be told in the way it was meant to be.
In all “Spring Awakening” is really a good night out and the production value was very high. STC has to be commended for putting on something different and more in touch with modern theatre and stage instead of sticking to the old school programmes that people had seen for x-trillion times.
