Some of the reviews:
NOW magazine (4 out of 5): Spring's sexual seduction
Grafting modern melodies and lyrics onto a classic period play, the award-winning Broadway musical Spring Awakening is a fascinating sprout of musical theatre.
... plunges the audience (some of whom sit onstage) into a rich, bubbling world of adolescent unrest, wet dreams, fantasies and desires that the play’s adults either ignore or frown upon.
http://www.nowtoronto.com/daily/story.cfm?content=168562 Toronto Star (3 out of 4): Spring's nice, but still awakening
The touring production of Spring Awakening which opened at the Canon Theatre last night, has all the potential to pack the same punch the hit musical did on Broadway, but at its first performance, it somehow seemed strangely muted.
All the ingredients were there – the dynamic score by Duncan Sheik, the striking staging of Michael Mayer, the edgy choreography of Bill T. Jones – but somehow it seemed as though we were viewing it all underwater.
http://www.thestar.com/Entertainment/Theatre/article/604742 Globe and Mail: The sexual revolution brought to you by the Victorians
A cast buttoned into navy-blue school uniforms and mid-length dresses acts out the inexorable 19th-century tragedy of the adolescents' experimentation and the adults' repression; but what they sing, microphones in hand, is a good ol' 20th-century rock show. The results are less than perfect - lapses in the staging and music mean the show ultimately fails to knock it out of the park - but the overall effect is more jarring, more provocative and more intelligent than Rent, that 1996 musical that moved La Bohème into the age of AIDS.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090321.ASPRING20/TPStory/Entertainment National Post: The grown-ups won’t even let us rhyme with ‘self-destruct’!
Matt Doyle renders Melchior as a strong full-throated all-American boy, which seems to be what's required; Blake Bashoff is sad-funny as Moritz, who finds his sexual urges even harder to cope with than Latin and math, and also labours under a hair-style apparently modelled on Shockheaded Peter; Christy Altomare is a sweet Wendla, though one who looks better able to take care of herself than her story requires. As for the score: Duncan Sheik's music peaks very early with the poignant opener Mama Who Bore Me, though as a song for the girls when the show is more about the boys, it sends false signals. There are a couple more nice ballads and a lot of musical rough-housing, some of it effective.
http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/story.html?id=1406840 Toronto Sun (4.5 out of 5): Sweet bard of youth
For a play about innocence, Spring Awakening explores issues that are anything but, and one needn't be an historian to imagine just how deeply Wedekind's exploration of masturbation, sadomasochism, homosexuality and teen pregnancy must have offended good burghers far beyond Germany's shores more than a century ago.
... This unevenness is occasionally frustrating, but in the end, what's left of the play serves to turn the score -- a glorious mix of tender harmonic melodies and pounding anthems -- into a glorious interior chorus to which anyone who has ever been a youth, known a youth or, perhaps more importantly, is still a youth, is almost certain to respond.
http://www.torontosun.com/entertainment/columnists/john_coulbourn/2009/03/20/8817891-sun.html EYE weekly (4 out of 5): Spring Awakening
All of the young singers are also excellent actors. Altomare and Doyle have particularly fine voices, but so do Blake Bashoff as Moritz and Steffi D as Ilse. Mayer’s staging is a compendium of Brecht’s so-called “alienation effects.” The band is on stage in full view and the acting platform has an onstage audience on two sides. We are constantly aware that we are watching actors performing an older play. Though costumed in 19th-century togs, the actors pull out 1940s-style mics when they sing. Kevin Adams’ lighting shifts drastically to separate the songs from, rather than integrate them into, the dialogue. Two actors, Angela Reed and Henry Stram, play all the repressive adults in the show, varying from realistic to grotesquely over-the-top. What impresses more than the once-shocking subject matter and Sheik’s languorous score is Mayer’s inexhaustible invention and the white-hot talent of the young performers who make it work.
http://www.eyeweekly.com/arts/theatre/article/55230--spring-awakening BlogTO: Spring Awakening is gonna bruise you
Spring Awakening is a musical mash-up of morality, sexuality and rock & roll. It was good to see the pit band on stage, where I could see them jam along to the great score, penned by Duncan Sheik.
*Student rush tickets are $25 and are available two hours prior to each performance with valid student ID, cash only, in-person the Canon box office. Limit one ticket per person.
http://blogto.com/theatre/2009/03/spring_awakening_is_gonna_bruise_you/
Coach Bob knew it all along: you've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. You have to keep passing the open windows. (John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire)
Updated On: 3/21/09 at 11:17 AM
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