an audience of the deaf and
blind
by Douglas Messerli
Steven Sater (Book and lyrics, based on a play by
Frank Wedekind), Duncan Sheik (music) Spring
Awakening / the performance I attended was on May 30, 2015 at the Bram
Goldsmith Theater at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in
Beverly Hills, California
Indeed
throughout most of its existence through the rest of the 20th
century, Wedekind’s homily to bourgeois society was threatened with censorship
and closings. As late as 1962 the play, performed in England, was threatened
with closure, and was allowed a run of only two nights in censored form. It was
not until Joseph Papp’s 1978 production that the play actually became available
on stage to the American public. And it was not until the early 21st
century production of a musical version in 2006, with book and lyrics by Steven
Sater and music by Duncan Sheik, that the play actually received the attention
it might have over 100 years earlier—if only the sexually terrified parents it
hectored had been able to remember their own youths.
O, I'm gonna be wounded
O, I'm gonna be your wound
O, I'm gonna bruise you
O, you're gonna be my bruise
O, I'm gonna be your wound
O, I'm gonna bruise you
O, you're gonna be my bruise
And in the openly rebellious sing-along, the students,
led by their intellectually superior Melchior (a charming Austin McKenszie) speaks
out:
[MELCHIOR]
There's
a moment you know
You're
fucked
Not
an inch more room
To
self destruct
No more
moves, oh, yeah
The
dead end zone
Man, you just
can't call
Your
soul your own
Yet, for the
most part, the Slater-Sheik score simply reiterates the ideals of a young
people blinded by their generations’ simplistic beliefs, but also filled with
the absolute openness of young people who simply cannot imagine (fortunately) all the horrors in the life
ahead they will have to face:
I believe
I believe
I
believe
Oh, I believe
There is love in Heaven
I believe
I
believe
I
believe
Oh,
I believe
There
is love in Heaven
I suppose that in a world where you’re not permitted to believe in love on
earth, Heaven is a great alternative, but it precisely that lack of imagination
which resulted, as we know in hindsight, in this same generation’s terrible
fates in World War I, and the their children’s children in World War II.
And even in this relatively
abandoned expression of the testosterone-driven boys and girls, Sater and Sheik
have felt the need to tone down Wedekind’s honest shrieks against bourgeois
notions of correctness, shifting Melchior’s rape of his beloved Wendla (Sandra
Mae Frank/voiced by Katie Boeck) to confusing give-and-take between the sexes,
behavior which, as I’ve described elsewhere, as encouraging males—at least of
my generation—to close their ears to female protests.
Los Angeles, June 1, 2015
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