John Simon Raves:
"Shows can be innovative without being good or vice versa. But when ``Spring Awakening,' a new musical, is both, it is grounds for cheering. It has been compared to ``Rent,' but in my view, it is more original and, quite simply, better. This ``Spring Awakening' may well be the first truly 21st-century musical on Broadway.
Based on the 1891 ``children's tragedy' by Frank Wedekind, it was a sensation in its day and periodically has been revived to good effect. Steven Sater, librettist and lyricist, and Duncan Sheik, a pop star and serious composer, began turning it into a musical in 1999. After many workshops, concert performances and delays, ``Spring Awakening' opened last summer at the Atlantic Theater Company and was an instant success.
I feared that something might be lost in the move to Broadway, as so often happens. On the contrary: With considerable rewriting, it is now better than before, having lost none of its immediacy while gaining in impact.
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But what is gained is Sheik's propulsive alternative rock score, which knows when to soften for romantic or wistful numbers. Cannily orchestrated by Sheik, with adroit vocal and additional arrangements by AnnMarie Milazzo and Simon Hale, it achieves a seductive sound that most recent Broadway musicals have lacked.
Sater's verses are nothing if not lyrical, sometimes even a bit too sophisticated for the kids from whom they issue.
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Though effective in performance, Sater's book elicits discomfiting second thoughts. There is a basic discrepancy between the plot, names (funny if you know German, albeit mispronounced here) and costumes that are 1890 Germany, and a language that is very American, very now. These talkers sound too emancipated and streetwise for the situations they are in.
There is inventiveness in the alternating use of body, handheld and standing mikes, in the way disparate actions are shown contiguously or in bold crosscutting. Bill T. Jones's youthfully evocative choreography -- it is unlike the dancing anywhere else on Broadway -- is idiosyncratic yet mesmerizing and deserves its own accolades for advancing the form. Kevin Adams's lighting, enhanced by a good deal of neon is, well, electrifying, and Susan Hilferty's period costumes are scrupulously appropriate.
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I could also have wished for a less obviously feelgood ending than one in which the quick and the dead join hands in a hopeful anthem. But enough carping. ``Spring Awakening' strikingly augurs the genre's future.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=akDdcnRDG0LQ&refer=muse
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie
[http://margochanning.broadwayworld.com/]
"The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney
