Theater News

Emily Sater’s friends aren’t allowed to see her dad’s musical. Never
mind that Spring Awakening is based on a century-old play
about adolescence. Forget that it swept the 2007 Tony Awards, just
began a national tour, and that many of her friends already own the
soundtrack. The parents won’t budge. Maybe it’s the fatally
botched abortion that gives them pause. Or the masturbation. Or the
copious sex, both gay and straight. Or the suicides.

“Some people have messed-up childhoods and then write plays about
it,” playwright Steven Sater cackled over the phone from his home in
Los Angeles. “I went the other way around—I wrote a musical to
mess up my kids!“

Not likely. In Spring Awakening—as in life—it’s
the silence, not the disclosure that causes the damage. The original
play, written in 1891 by Frank Wedekind, is a condemnation of priggish
and cruel adults who won’t discuss sex with their children. The result,
of course, isn’t abstinence: It’s all of the tragedy—and a little
of the comedy—of young people learning about sex by trial and
error. (Paying attention, Governor Palin?)

Sater met musician Duncan Sheik on
January 2, 1999, and they
wrote a song together that very day. Sater gave Sheik a copy of the
1891 Spring Awakening and suggested they work on an adaptation.
“Everyone was thinking millennial thoughts at the time,” Sater says.
“And I thought, what a beautiful way to look forward by looking back.”
The result is a rock musical in sepia tones—schoolboys in
black, 19th-century uniforms singing into microphones about stirrings
in their loins, a piano teacher’s breasts, and existential despair:
“It’s the bitch of living/And living in your head/It’s the bitch of
living/And sensing God is dead.”

Against all expectations, Spring Awakening was a massive hit.
“When we moved it from off Broadway to Broadway, our own producers
called it a suicide mission,” Sater says. The reviews were
excellent, the audience surged, and next year it will open on three
other continents.

“Our commercial success has opened the door and emboldened people to
produce and write more adventurous musicals,” Sater says, including
Passing Strange (a picaresque about a young black musician who
leaves South Central Los Angeles for Amsterdam and Berlin) and
Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson (an excellent emo-rock musical
about the seventh president that premiered in Los Angeles in
January).

“And,” Sater adds, “it gives the lie to the idea that kids aren’t
serious-minded, that all they love are video games, and that they can’t
be moved by a piece of literature.”

Spring Awakening runs Oct 14–19 at the Paramount
Theatre.