Spring Awakening

Spring Awakening is closing today on Broadway, and I'm really glad I caught one of its final performances yesterday at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre.

Hunter Parrish gave an excellent performance in his Broadway debut as Melchior, a teenager discovering love, and sex. More known for his role as Silas in the television series, Weeds, Parrish kept the same angst-ridden teen role but broke out with even more angst and emotion. Melchior is the smartest boy in school in this musical, which is set in a German town in the 1890s. However, the fact that he's very smart means that he questions authority and is atheist, which of course, attracts all the girls in town.

Melchior falls for Wendla, played by Alexandra Socha in her Broadway debut. She and Parrish have great chemistry on stage as they go from two children extremely confused about their attraction to young adults giving into sexual temptation, despite all the warnings from the adult men and women. Socha as Wendla starts the musical off with "Mama Who Bore Me," a song from a daughter, asking her mother about things in life. Afterward, she asks where babies come from, and her mother is too uncomfortable to tell her. Of course, when Wendla ends up pregnant from her escapades with Melchior, she has no idea that that was where babies come from.

All the adult men and all the adult women are played by the same two people. Tony Carlin, an understudy, filled in for the adult men, and he really showed the strict authoritarian that all the men from abusive fathers to the disciplinarian teacher. It both interesting and fitting that they only cast one person for all these roles - by nature of the musical, all the adults were the same. They were all telling their children that sex was wrong. They were all telling them to conform. In the end, their denial of sexual freedom and free thinking led to tragic consequences, and the message was just as powerful as the actors' performance.

It's a sad month for Broadway as it loses this show, but at least it had a great run. And on a side note, we had great seats. (Thanks, Kassie's mom!)