Exclusive: SPRING AWAKENING Cut Songs, Including ‘Haunting’ Duet With Gavin Creel, Explained

Fans of Spring Awakening will be transported to the early 2000s when the musical’s original Broadway cast recording is released by Decca Broadway next month on vinyl — featuring two never-before-heard songs from the show’s early stages. 

Ahead of the October 9 release, Steven Sater exclusively sits down with BroadwayWorld and shares new details about the previously unreleased tracks he penned with Duncan Sheik for their Tony Award-winning musical. 

“Listening to this album is so transporting for me,” Sater tells BroadwayWorld. “I had this whole trove of recordings, so I can tell you everything. This first song is called ‘All Begin to Call.’ It was from our second-ever workshop of Spring Awakening, which was at the Roundabout Theatre.” 

“All Begin to Call,” which was eventually replaced by “The Word of Your Body,” features a 14-year-old Lea Michele alongside a 24-year-old Gavin Creel, who was attached to the project before Jonathan Groff played the role of Melchior Gabor.  

“It’s the song when Wendla first comes upon Melchior in the woods,” explains Sater, who describes the tune as a “haunting, beautiful ballad” that “was so hard to cut.”

Initially, “The Word of Your Body” was solely written for the characters of Ernst and Hänschen. “The first recording we have of ‘The Word of Your Body’ is Duncan singing both parts for the boys,” says Sater, explaining that the comic reprise in the second act came after they decided to introduce the song with the characters of Wendla and Melchior. 

Hearing “All Begin to Call” with Michele and the late Creel is particularly meaningful now that it’s almost two years since the Tony Award-winning actor died from a rare form of cancer in 2024. 

“His voice on this recording — it just has so much beauty, so much yearning,” says Sater. “It was his first New York gig. When he sang at his audition, he was singing ‘Mirror Blue Night’ and went so far back, his hat fell off, and he almost fell over backwards singing it. He was so invested. That workshop meant so much to him.”

“I remember Lea was so in love with him for both workshops,” adds Sater. “They were so beautiful together.” 

The second track that will be unearthed on the upcoming Spring Awakening vinyl is a song titled “As Shadows Do,” featuring the voice of Lauren Pritchard. It was originally written to open the musical’s second act before being cut and ultimately replaced with “The Guilty Ones.”  

“We were being encouraged a lot to write a new song for the top of Act II through our final workshops,” Sater explains. 

Before there was “As Shadows Do,” there was a song called “There Once Was a Pirate,” a version of which was actually in the musical when it played at Off-Broadway’s Atlantic Theater Company. 

“[Wendla has] just been devastated,” says Sater, “and I thought it was a great way to begin the second act with her.” 

Sater then realized the song should be a duet for the characters of Wendla and Melchior, so “we wrote another song called ‘Once Upon a Pirate Night,’ which Jonathan and Lea sang [that] told the story more directly.” 

“It told what really had happened to them, and it was beautiful,” says Sater. However, it was scrapped. 

At the end of the first act, Wendla tells Melchior there’s a storm coming, so when they toyed with opening Act II with “As Shadows Do,” the opening line of the song, says Sater, is “Who told the rain to end?” 

However, Sater explains, “We never staged it. We worked on it one time with Lea and Jon. We had a sort of intermission, if you will, between Off-Broadway and Broadway when we were working on multiple things where I wrote the outro, for example, to ‘Those You’ve Known,’ so this was in that time period.” 

Director Michael Mayer ultimately told Sheik and Sater that “As Shadows Do” didn’t work. 

“Everyone loved the song, but he just felt it didn’t do what we needed,” says Sater, adding that he and Sheik wanted to eventually try the song out for another project they were working on. They had Pritchard, who originated the role of Ilse, record a demo of it years later. 

“It was never for Ilse. It was always for Wendla and Melchior,” says Sater. However, he adds, Pritchard “sings it in that characteristic, stunning, singular way that she sings everything.” 

“When we knew we were moving to Broadway — when our intrepid producers made that decision — we thought we had to write a new song,” says Sater, “which is when we wrote ‘The Guilty Ones.’”

To pre-order the Spring Awakening vinyl, click here.

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