Review: SPRING AWAKENING at Skylight Music Theatre

Skylight Music Theatre has a highlight of their season in Spring Awakening. The modern rock musical retelling of the 1890s German play explores some of humanity’s most taboo  subjects including shame, sex, and their lethal combination: sexual shame. Since its original run, Frank Wedekind's play has been controversial and easy fodder for censorship attempts. It was originally banned for its focus on and raw portrayal of teen sexuality under an oppressive society that rather lie and cover up human sexuality than explore its nuanced layers with the people who are most in need of a safe space to explore the subject. 

In its Tony-award winning (eight of them, to be exact) Broadway reimagining, Spring Awakening hit stages in 2006 with a young Jonathan Groff (King George of Hamilton and TV’s “Glee”) and a younger Lea Michele (Funny Girl and TV’s “Glee”) and featured a contemporary and highly sophisticated score by Duncan Sheik, of “Barely Breathing” 90s fame.

Almost ten years later, LA-based Deaf West Theatre reimagined Spring Awakening yet again—centering both hearing and deaf actors, taking the musical to a new level of inclusivity and visibility. Skylight Music Theatre continued this modernized and more inclusive practice by having the show's dialogue both spoken and signed in American Sign Language (ASL) throughout the show. At times, some dialogue appears as text projected onto a wall in the set.

Directed by Michael Unger and Alexandria Wailes, the production features the cast signing together in unison at times, particularly during songs, embodying beautifully the script whose subject matter literally touches upon young bodily urges, as in the song “Touch Me”. At most times, there may be one actor signing the words that another is speaking. The ASL signing only adds to the experience—it does not distract, it does not confuse, but it does add to the story in very physical ways felt by the actors and the audience at large. The actors’ use of ASL (which is a visual language that utilizes many body parts including facial expressions, shoulders, chest, arms, hands, and fingers, to name a few), viscerally punctuates the script, while hands dance to both the language phrases and sensual frustrations of adolescence. To watch this show is to step into a revolutionary mode of stage storytelling, and it may be hard for audiences to expect anything less moving forward.  

Skylight Music Theatre's cast includes both hearing and deaf actors as well, and features a non-speaking Wendla (Erin Rosefeld) and classmate Moritz (Joseph Saraceni), who are supported by speaking, and often singing, cast members Emma Knott and Edie Flores, respectively. Melchoir (Caden Marshall), the male lead of the musical, switches from speaking and signing throughout the show, again emphasizing how profound a “discovery” it is that we are, indeed, embodied people. The story begins with Wendla asking her mother to explain how reproduction works, and all she is left to believe is that only married people can ethically consummate and biologically reproduce. This jarring tone of the play continues throughout, as Wendla’s classmates are also sheltered from common and important knowledge; their mental and bodily autonomy stripped from them due to miseducation from conservative parents, teachers, and church pastor. The adults’ obsession in the musical with not ruining youth innocence brings severe damage to the students in Wendla’s class, including overwhelm and isolation when consumed by sexual frustration, child sexual abuse, suicide, sexual assault, sexual identity crisis, and death by a nonconsensual and botched abortion. 

Spring Awakening depicts these mature and heartbreaking stories through an unfiltered, in-your-face, what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it flavor that provides for stellar lyrics by Steven Sater (songs that come to mind are “The B---- of Living”, “My Junk”, and “Totally F-----“), comic relief at times (found in the sexual fantasies imagined by Moritz of their school piano teacher), and a scene that invites the viewer to confront their own relationship to authority, morality, freedom, and oppression (the students literally shake their frustrations out through their bodies, writhing and squirming, yelling “blah blah blah” to the audience, mimicking their school administrators). As someone who attended a Catholic high school after a fully public K-8 experience, this part of the show resonated with me deeply. While my high school experience was mostly fulfilling, meaningful, and fun, I, too, was subject to a shaming view of sexuality and abstinence-only education. To witness this show is to confront your own relationships with some of its harder themes. 

At its best, Spring Awakening smartly and gut-punchingly calls out religious and bourgeois hypocrisy and shows the (very literal) grave dangers of society’s obsession with innocence and sexual purity on the very youth that this obsession claims to protect. Here, on Skylight Music Theatre’s stage, its inclusivity transcends it to new heights. As I sat in the theater witnessing the final song ("The Song of Purple Summer"), the cast turns to each other in lyrical embrace, holding hands and singing of hope after such sorrow. Flower petals cascade down from the ceiling, as the living charcaters are once again joined by characters that have passed during the show. I am reminded that despite it all, winter turns a corner, and summer emerges again; hope still springs eternal.

Spring Awakening runs through March 17, 2024 at the Cabot Theatre in Milwaukee’s Broadway Theatre Center.

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