BWW Reviews: SPRING AWAKENING national tour at TPAC

After much too long, Spring Awakening - the eight-time Tony Award-winning musical about teen angst and sexual awakening in late-19^th century Germany - finally made its Nashville debut Friday, February 25, settling into Tennessee Performing Arts Center's Andrew Jackson Hall for a five-performance run. And though the show was a long time in coming to Music City, the audience watched raptly as the fresh-faced cast of talented young actors brought the story to life with vigor and total commitment.

Based on the 1891 play by Frank Wedekind, with book and lyrics by Steven Sater and the Indie Rock-inspired music by Duncan Sheik, Spring Awakening clearly is not your grandmother's Broadway musical. Instead, this provocative, high energy show might rightly be described as a musical for the new millennium, appealing to a younger, hipper crowd that needs to be brought into the theater if it is to survive into the future. That's not to say that Spring Awakening doesn't offer much to appeal to the tastes of the more traditional theater-goer, because it does: there's a compelling story, a memorable musical score, Bill T. Jones' stunning choreography (a controlled jumble of angular, athletic motion that telegraphs the characters' inner turmoil) and so much more to recommend it to audiences.

Much has been made about the script's language (as if "fuck" hasn't been uttered by just about everyone on the planet) and its unabashed frankness, which is essential to deliver the play's message of the dangers of repression and fear to a contemporary audience. Basically, it amounts to a tempest in a teabagger's boiling-over pot of regret and recriminations. With a script and score written in the contemporary vernacular, Sater and Sheik demonstrate that the realities of adolescence remain as unwieldy and as horrifically inane and glaringly pedestrian as they have for centuries. Yet every new generation presumes they are experiencing those feelings for the first time ever; Spring Awakening nudges younger theater-goers to the realization that there is actual historical context for what they are feeling.

In Spring Awakening (which was heavily censored and often banned in Wedekind's lifetime), the lyricist and composer have intelligently distilled the original script to make it more palatable - and perhaps more subversive, even - for modern audiences, eliminating a vicious rape and replacing it with the first, tender throes of teenage lovemaking.

The musical focuses on the lives of six young men and five young women in a provincial German town in the late 1890s (not unlike the Hanover of Wedekind's upbringing). With the initial blooming of their collective sexuality and the accompanying flurry of intellectual speculation and experimentation, the stage is set for the dramatic scenes that unfold before you.

At curtain, naïve young Wendla (played by Elizabeth Judd in a guileless, beautifully contained performance that is so eloquently expressed in her singing), feeling the waves of puberty beginning to wash over her, implores her prudish mother (Sarah Kleeman, effortlessly portraying all the adult women in the piece) to explain to her where babies come from and about the changes her body is experiencing ("Mama Who Bore Me"). When her mother explains that a woman will only give birth when she is totally in love with her husband, Wendla believes she understands all there is to know on the subject - foreshadowing the travails that her ignorance will certainly thrust upon her.

Meanwhile, the young men of the village are seen in their classroom (the depiction of the boys at their studies accurately reflects the strictly disciplined nature of the German educational system of the time), with anxiety-ridden Moritz (achingly played by the talented Coby Getzug, whose wild and other-worldly hairstyle replicates his character's psyche: in Act One, it's wild and untamed; in Act Two, it's changed to reflect the terrors of his young life) bearing the brunt of the schoolmaster's (Mark Poppleton, in a superbly nuanced portrayal of all the adult men in the lives of the younger characers) wrath, only to be defended by the dreamily handsome, yet impressively intellectual young cynic Melchior Gabor (played with haunting conviction by Christopher Wood in a completely charming and expressive performance, particularly in his "All That's Known" and "Left Behind").

The school's competitive and repressive atmosphere is brought to life in the terrific and showstopping "The Bitch of Living," perhaps the best-known number from the score, here led by Getzug to vividly illustrate the dueling parts of his personality - as well as his schoolmates' inner demons.

It's clear from the start that Wendla, Melchior and Moritz - along with all their friends and comrades, who include the abused Ilse (Courtney Markowitz) and Martha (Aliya Bowles) and the budding homosexuals Hanschen (Devon Stone) and Ernst (Daniel Plimpton) - are destined for the unhappiness and despair that ensues as the plot develops.

Expressing their characters' plight through their superb portrayals (the cast is uniformly impressive in their work), the young people are given the opportunity to proclaim their hidden desires, secret fears and heartfelt dreams through the songs ("The Word of Your Body" and "The Guilty Ones" are good examples, while the aptly title "Totally Fucked" is a raucous tour de force for the entire company) crafted by Sater and Sheik that are at once disturbing, yet filled somehow with glimmers of hope and beauty, perhaps most sublimely expressed in the show-closing "The Song of Purple Summer." Led by the exquisitely beautiful Markowitz, as Ilse, the cast delivers this lushly scored anthem of hope with conviction and a genuine sense of optimism that permeates the proceedings.

The actors' superb performances are aided and abetted by the terrific onstage band accompanying them, led by conductor Kasey Graham, supplying the frenetic musical energy that propels the play's action along at an egrossing speed. Kevin Adams' spectacular lighting design plays an integral role in focusing the audience's attention to the action taking place onstage and evocatively casting shadows and light upon Christine Jones' beautifully realized set (which looks not unlike a Bennigan's, circa 1891, with its soaring upstage brick wall adorned by a variety of visual touchstones symbolizing the themes expressed in the book and lyrics). Susan Hilferty's sumptuous costumes, which are lovely recreations of late-19^th century school uniforms and Victorian era clothing, reinforce the feelings of repression that are set against the musicality of the 21^st century sensibilities of the show's creators.

- Spring Awakening. A New Musical. Book and lyrics by Steven Sater. Music by Duncan Sheik. Based on the play by Frank Wedekind. Presented by NETworks as part of Tennessee Performing Arts Center's 30^th Anniversary Season. At Andrew Jackson Hall, Nashville. Through Sunday, February 27. For details and ticket information, visit the website at www.tpac.org.

Pictured: Coby Getzug as Moritz in Spring Awakening