Theatre review: Spring Awakening

DISCLAIMER: Drama school productions are classed as amateur performances; but as ever, I try to treat them the same as I would professional ones as that's what the cast will be aiming to do next.

It's been a while since I went to one of LAMDA's public performances, and I've not seen them do a musical before, but Vanessa wouldn't have forgiven me if we'd missed a chance to see one of her absolute favourites, Spring Awakening. Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik's Broadway musical takes Frank Wedekind's famously banned 19th century play and plays it pretty well straight in the spoken-word scenes, adding deliberately anachronistic songs revealing what the kids are really thinking. Melchior (Ross Kugman tonight - two casts alternate between performances) is the first of his classmates to find out about sex, and only because he reads about it in a book. Apart from those Melchior informs himself, the others remain completely unaware as their parents refuse to discuss it. In the case of his girlfriend Wendla (India Shaw-Smith,) her mother's painfully coy description of the facts of life leads to tragedy. Other kids suffering include the resident loser Moritz (Soroosh Lavasani,) whose parents will disown him if he fails, which his teachers are determined he will.

Theatre review: Spring Awakening

A play best known for scandalising audiences in the late 19th century is always going to have trouble creating quite as much impact in the 21st. Any production of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening now has an additional hurdle if it wants to stand out, as Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater's musical version raised the bar in its irreverence and energy. The last production of the straight play I saw felt dry, like it was simply missing the songs, but Headlong is the kind of company that exists to see things differently, and this new version quickly imprints its own identity on the play. It's the story of Melchior (Oliver Johnstone,) a nihilistic teenager at the centre of a group of friends trying, with limited success, to tackle growing up. The adults in their lives are no help, in fact whether they're putting undue pressure on their children or leaving important gaps in their sexual education, they're most often a hindrance.

Theatre review: Spring Awakening

Although I've heard of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening and knew roughly what it was about, I'd never seen the original play on stage before. So I now come to it from the unusual position of being very familiar with the much-loved (but not by enough people to keep it open) musical adaptation. Would I be able to see it as anything other than the show I liked with the best bits taken out? The story revolves around three teenagers: Wendla (Ana Luderowski) is 14, and keeps asking her mother for the facts of life, but gets only evasive answers. Moritz (Joe Sowerbutts) isn't that bright, his life mainly consisting of studying for exams he has no chance of passing; having had it drummed into him that academic success is everything, the prospect of failing is enough to turn his thoughts to suicide. Meanwhile the central figure of Melchior (David Palmstrom) is a bit too clever for his own good: Seeing himself as an atheist and iconoclast, he's taught himself about sex from books, and his attempts to share his knowledge with his classmates will backfire horribly.