Spring Awakening is the best musical ever.

No, really. Spring Awakening won eight Tony Awards in 2007, and for good reason. In short, it's a semi-modern adaptation of Franz Wenderkind's play Spring Awakenings, which was banned after its publication in Germany in the late 1800s. The Broadway incarnation is still set in the 1890s like the original, but while the costume, setting and society in general are conservative, religious nineteenth century German, the vernacular is very 21st century American. With song titles like "Totally Fucked" and "The Bitch of Living," it's kind of hard to miss. In kind, the characters' names, which are unchanged, are butchered via pronunciation in a typically American way. It's not a bad thing, honestly. The way the whole play works, the modern attitude and twist taken on the old German play, if what seemed like typical modern teenagers dumped in a starkly different setting had actually pronounced the names with a perfect German accent, it would have stood out. Still, it's something to note if you're a German speaker and can't stand Americanized pronunciation.

I have heard a few people call Spring Awakening "the Rent for this generation." It's an appropriate comparision, but also an inadequate one. It does work in some ways. They're definitely both edgy and both aimed at a younger audience (the edgy, artsy 20-something crowd ate Rent up when it came out, and should do the same for Spring Awakening) and are both musically different from the traditional understanding of musical theatre.

Rent is by all standards a rock musical, which is a term that specifically categorizes the score of a play, but also more abstractly the tone and attitude. Basically, rock musicals are musicals scored with electric guitars and pop-rock styled vocals, sex and vulgar language in the lyrics, rebellious (and usually dated) topics, and angry, energetic, overtly political teenage and twenty-something characters. Vaguely. It's as nebulous as most genre categories are these days, but I think that's a pretty solid way of generalizing it.

Spring Awakening is kind of like that. The songs are like mainstream folk-rock turned theatre. The characters have potty mouths... or potty minds, at any rate. Unlike most musicals, the songs are not the dialogue and motion of a scene; rather, they're the internal monologue of the characters involved in a scene as it happens. If it's necessary to hear the conversation during a song, they'll break off singing and talk, and then go back to singing. Sometimes the whole cast will mobilize and sing a song that really only takes place in the mind of one character, and sometimes their thoughts will intersect to form one song they both equally take part in, intellectually. It's a really interesting way to look at a musical. And while there are sort of dance numbers, there aren't really. In "Bitch of Living," which is linked above to the official music video, they dance with chairs, and in "Totally Fucked" they do a vaguely dance-resembling full cast thing, but it's mostly running around and stomping and being energetic teenagers. It works, but it's by no means Hairspray or Grease.

Where Spring Awakening surpasses Rent, however, is in the "dated" aspect. Where Rent was set, in its time, in a very current setting dealing with very current issues, Spring Awakening is set in the 1890s dealing with (what, at least, Franz Wenderkind considered) 1890s German problems. It's covered in a somewhat modern way, but it's deliberately historical. Honestly, I don't see how this could become nearly as dated as most other rock musicals have become. This is not to say that Spring Awakening dealt with these problems in the same way that Wenderkind did in his Spring Awakenings, but the point still stands. The problems are still the same, if presented in a more audience-pleasing, tasteful fashion. But that's a topic for the next post.