Spring’s Awakening
The portrayal of overheated adolescence was a bit too much to handle from a cast of twenty to thirty year olds in the production of “Springs Awakening”. The play will definitely merit itself as one of the most innovative rendition of Broadway plays with their chock full of rock and roll numbers but in terms of content, the play was a sad comparison to the book. As an entertainment production, Springs Awakening could not have been more rewarding. The burst of energy and lights brought the audience to life and turned a potentially awkward production into a very comical night.
The Broadway production is based on the book, Springs Awakening, by Frank Wedekind. The play exposes the hidden sexual deviances of the minds of a group of German children. When I say children, believe it or not, Wedekind’s characters are indeed what our society would consider pre-teen. The main characters, Wendla, Moritz, and Melchior, find themselves in situations that even adults find difficult to handle. The large plots involve Wendla’s rape by Melchior atop a haystack, which leads to an unintended pregnancy. This manifest into a spiraling set of events that lead to her death from abortion pills. Moritz, pounded by numerous stress factors, such as school work, grades, and his future, corners himself into an uncontrollable depression. This depression results in a committed suicide. All these events, however, only exemplifies these children’s restrictive society. As a result of hiding their sexual curiosity, Wendla and Melchior gave in to animalistic actions and serious consequences arises. Moritz also found himself in a dark place as his thoughts as a failure in the eyes of his peers and superiors left him in a manic depressive state.
However, the Broadway play did not capture the extent of these stories in the production. The play was very entertaining and contemporary which surely captured the young audiences, but for those that came to watch the play after reading the book, the play was an incomplete production. The stage was plain and the costumes were ordinary which aided in the visual of a restrictive society but most of the play consisted of loud music, lewd scenes, and sprinkles of the plot that captured little of the message from the derived book.