Why I Hate “Spring Awakening”
*Warning*: Sensitive material regarding sex, mental health, and suicide ahead. If these subjects might be triggering for you, please proceed with caution.
Spring Awakening has been a show I have said I hated for years. Before I had ever read the show or listened to the soundtrack, I knew that Spring Awakening was a show about a bunch of teens experiencing their sexual awakenings, and the chaos and tragedy that ensued. I also knew that Spring Awakening famously includes onstage nudity, which, in my mind, strips the opportunity for teenagers to play teenage roles. In a world where teens already book a fraction of the roles written about them, I felt inner disdain toward Spring Awakening for making it impossible for real teens to perform. However, I recently realized that I had been spewing an uninformed opinion about a show that I had never seen, read, or fully listened to into the world. After reading the show for the first time a few weeks ago, though, I now feel justified in reinforcing my opinion that Spring Awakening is not only a perpetuation of teen stereotypes in a highly sexualized world, but a show that was lauded for setting theatre back nearly a century.
My first qualm with Spring Awakening is the afore-mentioned perpetuation of teenage stereotypes. The entirety of the show revolves around fifteen and sixteen year-olds engaging in sexual situations, lying to their parents, and struggling with vague mental-health crises. Though I believe that every story has the right to be told, and as sure as I am that Spring Awakening reflects the stories of some teens in the world, the totalitarian approach of this particular show frustrates me. Though it is set in a late 19th-century German town seemingly founded upon a highly religious community that defies any form of sex education at all(more on that later) where co-education spaces are unheard of, somehow nearly ever member of the leading cast manages to explore their sexuality and make a mess of the whole affair. In addition, the show does not present these issues in a tasteful way, in my opinion. I have seen shows that have handled the issue of teen pregnancy beautifully, such as one of my personal favorites, Bright Star. Though Bright Star‘s lead character, Alice, gets pregnant at sixteen and faces hardships surrounding that, it is presented in a way that avoids explicit material. Spring Awakening, however, goes just about as far as it can in presenting the grittiness of its subject matter. Though I will not go into much detail regarding the extent of its portrayal of sex in order to keep this blog relatively family-friendly, I felt genuinely disgusted at the edginess it was expressing through “art”. The fact that most of the teens in this show go on a sexual journey, coupled with the highly explicit nature of the material, induce my feelings of hatred toward the story and its portrayal.
I understand, of course, that particular problem with the show is highly subjective, and others might feel it perfectly represents their feelings and experience. Fear not, I have dramaturgical misgivings towards Spring Awakening as well. *Spoilers ahead* The entirety of the show revolves around a premise that is rather difficult to believe. The show opens with the main character, Wendla, frustrated with her highly religious mother, who tells Wendla babies are brought to parents by storks. Yes. Storks. Of course, Wendla no longer believes this, but she still does not know how babies are actually made. Eventually, her mother finally tells her the “whole” truth: a wife has to “love only her husband” in a very special way. Therefore, it is only after Wendla sleeps with her boyfriend, Melchior, for the first time that her mother tells her why she is pregnant. Wendla is genuinely shocked by this news, and is later coerced by her parents to get an abortion. This decision ends tragically for Wendla. This storyline, to me, is nearly impossible to believe. As someone who has been raised religiously and constantly been around others who have been raised religiously by their parents, I have never once heard of anyone who genuinely doesn’t understand the basics of sex. Even the sex-ed classes at the Christian school I went to through middle school didn’t limit their courses to abstinence-only education. In addition, it is hard to believe that Wendla didn’t pick up things from school, even in the highly repressive environment of the story. Songs like “The Bitch of Living” and “Touch Me” make it very clear that sex is on literally everyone’s minds, so the idea that the students don’t ever talk about it with each other, or make crude remarks to that effect, is highly improbable. Similarly, I also despise the way mental-health is handled in this show. Moritz, Melchior’s best friend, commits suicide halfway through Act II seemingly because… he failed his finals and is getting held back a year in school. Obviously, this is an unfortunate circumstance, but it is hard to buy that this extenuating circumstance alone made him spiral to the point of taking his own life. If there was more context given to his decline and I felt the build-up of his depression and angst culminate with this event, I might feel differently about it. However, as I read it, Moritz’s suicide felt more like an excuse to hit another hot-button teen issue without much clarity or delicacy than a true exploration of mental health and its devastating effect on teen lives. And in typical Spring Awakening fashion, they hold no punches… as Moritz is seen placing a gun in his mouth before the lights black out.
Finally, I find it frustrating that the writers and cast tried to claim the show was “revolutionary” in its structure, when it really set back musical theatre nearly a century. If you are familiar with the Spring Awakening soundtrack, you are probably aware the songs almost never move the story forward. They instead stop the show to take a few minutes to enter the minds of the characters, expressing their feelings through dense metaphors and vague connections to the plot at hand. Now don’t get me wrong– the soundtrack is the only thing I really love about Spring Awakening. The music is beautiful, the lyrics are evocative, and the rock score is appropriately angsty and contemporary. However, calling the removal of songs from their narrative context “revolutionary” is truly baffling to me. In the days before musical theatre was forever changed by the genius of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, songs were merely momentary diversions from the story in order to entertain the audience with great music and dancing. And though Spring Awakening often trades dancing for sexual simulations, it is a very similar way of approaching theatre. It was Rodgers and Hammerstein who turned the tide of musical theatre, allowing dialogue, music, and dance to seamlessly weave the tapestry of a great story in tandem. And it’s fine that the writers of Spring Awakening decided to have their characters pick up microphones and sing contemporary rock songs when not moving the story forward with dialogue, but it’s not revolutionary; if anything, it was moving the theatrical medium backwards. Also, for the record– Spring Awakening wasn’t even the first show that incorporated a rock score; Jonathan Larson wrote Rent a decade earlier, and he managed to use his songs to advance the narrative, too.
I understand that many people will vehemently disagree with my take on this show, and that’s fine. I recognize that it has an incredible score with relevant and important themes about the hypocrisy of adults and educational systems when it comes to sex education and the stigmatization of mental health. However, because of my issues with the show’s explicit portrayal of teenage sexuality, the disbelief I can’t suspend regarding the premise, and the fact that it advertised its structure as revolutionary when it was not, I do not believe in this show or the manner in which it tells its story.
Was I preaching to the choir? Or do you disagree with every sentence I wrote? Let me know in the comments below!
February 3, 2022