Spring Awakening

In-your-face coming-of-age rock musical Spring Awakening, with themes including teenage sexuality (heterosexual, homosexual and masturbation), child abuse and youth suicide will shock some, and not be for all tastes.

Yet its flip side attraction, the beauty and pain of the journey through puberty and sexual discovery that the musical travels, and that rock score, will certainly appeal to many others, including younger audiences.

Shire Music Theatre’s production achieves an appropriate balance between wit and sensitivity as it travels this journey in the first act, before very effectively tackling the second act’s explosive consequences.

The book of Spring Awakening, a lean adaptation of Franz Wedekind’s controversial 1891 play of the same title, remains set in its original period, juxtaposed with a driving contemporary rock score to express the inner voices of the musical’s predominantly teenage characters.

The issues – though more repressed 110 years ago - are universal.

The young company’s voices do justice to the score, in both its more raucous and particularly beautiful phases.

A production team of relative newcomers - Bridget Keating (Director), Bec Gordon (Musical Director) and Joel Duffy (Choreographer) - has delivered a clean, fresh, minimalist production.

It is a production pitched on the right scale for the challenges of this difficult, small venue and cramped stage (even with extensions). This was particularly true in terms of the truthful, appropriately projected acting of the dramatic scenes and the balanced sound mix achieved by isolating the band. Mainstage props were wisely limited to half a dozen chairs, which the cast arranged to suggest a variety of locations (a smart choice considering the prop and scenery tangles I’ve seen on this stage in other productions).

Shire has selected a vital, engaging young cast, if often somewhat older than the teenagers they portray, who launch into the show with passion and enthusiasm.

Two older actors play all the play’s adult authority figures, and as in last year’s professional production, mostly play the roles as broad stereotypes.

A detailed, atmospheric lighting design and plot requires precise synchronization between the performers and operators, which occasionally missed marginally, but follow spots are, happily, absent.

The winner of eight 2007 Tony Awards including Best Musical, Spring Awakeningran for just over 2 years on Broadway, but the Olivier Award winning West End production closed after just 2 months.

While the show wasn’t a great commercial hit, it’s an excellent fit for Shire Music Theatre, the former Sutherland Light Opera Company, which has morphed into a young, boutique musical theatre company, carving a unique niche for themselves in Sydney community theatre by presenting a lot of lesser-known and small cast musicals.

Neil Litchfield