Spring Awakening
Calling fans of rock musicals
If you come to New York any time in the near future (as you should), you need to see Spring Awakening.
The story revolves around teens attempting to cope with blooming sexuality in a puritanical community that refuses to tell them what's happening to their bodies and what their feelings mean.
The story is good. But the music, oh man, the music.
When Rent first came on the scene, there were many people who said its success would usher in a new era, the era of the true rock musical of the modern rock age. However, the successful musicals since Rent have been, almost universally, even less rocking than Rent. That is, not a whole lot changed, really.
Spring Awakening, though, feels like what we were promised, all those years ago. Set in some unspecified yet clearly pre-modern puritanical rural community, it nonetheless uses rock, real rock (or at least pop rock), to do exactly what it's best at doing - expressing universal feelings of angst, misery, heartbreak, and, sometimes, excited joy.
It has its fair share of beautiful power ballads and angsty acoustic folk-rock book numbers, but the stand-out songs are the harder-rock ensemble numbers. Boys in knee-pants, school jackets, and caps and girls in long prairie dresses and pigtails jumping around the stage like a perfectly choreographed mosh pit, screaming their lungs out (in perfect harmony) about their bodies, the other sex, and the frustration of living where they do, when they do, and how they do.
It. Fucking. Rules.
See the show, but hold your jaw. You wouldn't want it to drop all the way off.
If you come to New York any time in the near future (as you should), you need to see Spring Awakening.
The story revolves around teens attempting to cope with blooming sexuality in a puritanical community that refuses to tell them what's happening to their bodies and what their feelings mean.
The story is good. But the music, oh man, the music.
When Rent first came on the scene, there were many people who said its success would usher in a new era, the era of the true rock musical of the modern rock age. However, the successful musicals since Rent have been, almost universally, even less rocking than Rent. That is, not a whole lot changed, really.
Spring Awakening, though, feels like what we were promised, all those years ago. Set in some unspecified yet clearly pre-modern puritanical rural community, it nonetheless uses rock, real rock (or at least pop rock), to do exactly what it's best at doing - expressing universal feelings of angst, misery, heartbreak, and, sometimes, excited joy.
It has its fair share of beautiful power ballads and angsty acoustic folk-rock book numbers, but the stand-out songs are the harder-rock ensemble numbers. Boys in knee-pants, school jackets, and caps and girls in long prairie dresses and pigtails jumping around the stage like a perfectly choreographed mosh pit, screaming their lungs out (in perfect harmony) about their bodies, the other sex, and the frustration of living where they do, when they do, and how they do.
It. Fucking. Rules.
See the show, but hold your jaw. You wouldn't want it to drop all the way off.