Spring Awakening

Spring Awakening has been called a lot of great things by a lot of critics, but back in Tacoma I was only hearing mixed reviews.

Before going I downloaded the soundtrack, because it's always easier to see a musical if you have some idea of the music ahead of time, and I wasn't too impressed. It sounded like a Rent ripoff, and I wasn't such a fan of Rent, either. After not-so-stellar reviews and the soundtrack sounding not so great on my speakers, we were both a little tentative, but we had our tickets purchased.

We were feeling much better about it even just a few minutes in.

The musical is based on a scandalous-for-the-time German play from the 1890's about horny teenagers discovering a world hidden from them by their parents and teachers (a parentocracy, one calls it). It's not exactly what you think of when you think of source material for Tony-winning plays, but it manages to work pretty well.

The first act is high energy, the music is great, the story generally moves along save for a few slow scenes. Then there's a rather surprising scene of a beating with a switch followed by the end of Act I climax of two teens really discovering things, complete with some scandalous-for-our-times nudity.

Unfortunately, you could spend half of the 15 minute intermission writing down what's going to happen in the second act and you'd probably be right. The play loses steam, there's a bit too much preaching about issues that it seems like we've moved past already, but it's biggest flaw is just being cliche and predictable.

The second act does have the most high octane song performance in the show, Totally F***ed, although I find The Bitch of Living is in my head more often (those titles should tell you something about the show).

I left feeling generally positive about the show, and I would say that it's execution was quite good. But the story needed some extra creative spark to get its way through the second act and keep it interesting.