Rude Awakening
By Shawn-Marie Garrett
Spring Awakening: A New Musical
Based on the play by Frank Wedekind
Book and Lyrics by Steven Sater
Music by Duncan Sheik
Eugene O'Neill Theatre
230 W. 49th St.
Box office: (212) 239-6200
Shortly before the Tony nominations were announced,
I finally got around to seeing Spring Awakening: A New Musical on
Broadway. Sitting on the stage, practically a member of the ensemble
(or so I fantasized), I found the experience amusing enough while it
lasted. Yet the show has since collapsed so completely under the pressure
of further reflection that I feel compelled to offer a dissenting opinion,
quaintly enough, on moral grounds. As far as I can tell, this is the
first dissenting opinion of any kind that has yet been published, which
is odd. In casual conversations, nearly everyone (including members
of the musical's teenaged target audience) begins by acknowledging that
the show is basically "lame"--everyone, that is, except its smitten
professional critics.
Morality aside, SA the Musical suffers
from glaring formal, structural, and aesthetic weaknesses. Aesthetically,
the most obvious problem is that neither of the show's basic musical
genres, classic rock and mild-mannered punk, is really "edgy," so the
project is a shameless taming and dumbing down of a still-disturbing
1891 play. No objections here, by the way, to rock musicals per se:
Hedwig rocked the (off-Broadway) house. But SA the Musical
is actually less artistically modern than Frank Wedekind's original,
irrespective of chronology, and the whole exercise serves primarily
as a reminder that the fin-de-XXe-siècle Berlin experimental arts scene
was more radical than our contemporary version (but we already knew
that) and that history is not progressive (ditto). It also offers further
proof (if we needed any) that current mainstream New York theater, whether
on, off, or nowhere near Broadway, mostly resembles that of mid-18th-century
London: a popular theater of recycling, bowdlerizing, and sentimentality.
For decades now it has been unfashionable, or
fashionable only in unfashionable circles, to consider art in moral
terms. This reluctance is an understandable (if superficial) reaction
by aficionados faced with encroaching cultural fundamentalism, a habit
that confounds moralism with morality. Morality with its legion conundrums
is still very much with us, whether we like it or not. What has happened,
though, is that moralism rushes in (with its mega-churches and mega-musicals)
where morality fears to tread. SA the Musical is not mega by
Broadway standards but it is moralistic, and its moral blind spots give
rise (as such blind spots always do) to artistic problems, plot problems,
even logical problems that require no special training to discern.
In adapting the play, the musical's director
and producers kept Wedekind's central, infamous rape scene. Somewhere
between Chelsea and Times Square, however, they changed it from one
of disturbing or at least uncomfortable quasi-forced sex (as played
off-Broadway) to one of missionary-position love-making (as played on
Broadway). Christopher Isherwood surmised in his Broadway review that
"only scholars are likely to care that a key plot turn, a sex scene
with the central female character, the pubescent Wendla Bergman (Lea
Michele), has been thoroughly softened from confused ambiguity into
a consensual act." Confounded again, morality is thus "thoroughly softened"
into moralistic textual purism and exiled to the provinces of nitpicking
scholars (German literature scholars, presumably, those strident advocates
of theatrical rape fantasies).
"Softening" the play's rape scene, making it
seem like it's not rape, is the moral equivalent of marrying Cordelia
off to Edgar at the end of King Lear. Wendla's rape is the
terrible, troubling crux of Spring Awakening. The Broadway
producers' no-means-yes bowdlerizing makes the scene less shocking,
less moral (to put it mildly), and paradoxically less feminist--political
correctness once again gone awry. Staging and thereby confronting rape
is not criminal or offensive. Pretending rape isn't rape is.
No doubt there was a heart-stopping moment in
the transfer process when somebody realized you can't rape someone and
then sing about it on Broadway. What's more, the audience won't like
Melchior if he rapes Wendla, and if we can't have a hero we at least
need an anti-hero, right? One might imagine similar scruples about another
character's confessing that her father physically and sexually abuses
her, after which she breaks into a song about it. Evidently, the production
team felt this was more plausible or acceptable than the deeply creepy
rape, though. Creepier still: the producers' hoary platitudes about
why forced penetration might just be an act of love after all. Inevitably,
the actress playing Wendla (Lea Michele) carries the burden of parroting
these platitudes to the press: "It used to be where you might have thought
it would have been along the lines of rape," Michele told Playbill,
"but the more we learned about the play the more we realized these two
characters were very much in love with each other, and we really just
showed the truth of that. Michael [Mayer, the director] really managed
to make it very classy and just very respectful. I wouldn't do anything
if I felt it wasn't respectful."
Wedekind would. In his mysterious final scene,
a character called the Masked Man (first played by the author) reminds
the audience that the play is about morality, and not the easy conventional
kind: "By morality I understand the real product of two imaginary forces,"
the Masked Man says. "The imaginary forces are should and would.
The product is called Morality, and no one is allowed to forget that's
real." A naive, aroused, presumably virgin boy rapes an ignorant yet
provocative virgin girl: this presents a moral problem not easily solved,
the product of would without should. The same boy
and girl have loving, consensual sex: this presents no moral problem
(the product of would and should) unless you think
that kids having sex, period, is immoral. Here we glimpse the deeply
conservative moralism of SA the Musical which, in a single
stroke, unwittingly endorses the myopia of the play's laughably conventional
parents and teachers.
Far from a simple celebration of desire, Spring
Awakening explores the truth and consequences of desire: what happens
when desire is repressed and then--inevitably, ignorantly, chaotically--unleashed.
It also shows the abuse of power, or "the misuse of authority," as Edward
Bond once wrote. Melchior is one of the people in the play who misuses
his authority and thereby makes somebody else suffer. Melchior knows
about sex, Wendla doesn't--in a deeply ambiguous play, there's no ambiguity
about this. In that most difficult scene, Wendla says to Melchior, "Don't
kiss me!" and "When you are in love--then you kiss--no, no!" She says
this because her mother tells her in an earlier scene that a woman becomes
pregnant when she "loves her husband with her whole heart," and she
is afraid that if Melchior kisses her it will mean they love each other
with their whole hearts and consequently she will become pregnant.
This is the magnitude of Wendla's ignorance.
Admittedly, it is hard to imagine a contemporary American girl so ignorant
when hardcore is only a mouse-click away, which poses a problem for
any contemporary production of Spring Awakening. Nevertheless,
Wendla can't be "sex-positive" if she doesn't know what sex is. Making
her seem so is just sloppy directing.
The production is fuzzy on several such points,
but its attitude towards one of the play's key troubling questions--is
masculinity itself a threat?--is clear: SA the Musical simply
refuses to entertain the possibility. The answer to the next logical
question threatens to bore us all, once again, to politically correct
tears: no, none of the primary members of the production's creative
team nor any of its powerful primary producers nor any of its gushy
reviewers is a woman. Why bother critiquing a Broadway musical on this
or any other moral front when, as a commercial production, its only
moral obligation is to the bottom line? On the other hand, why should
the words "Broadway" and "commercial" (i.e., "free market") banish all
serious criticism of a production, especially one with semi-serious
aspirations to become (by now it's a cliché) "the next Rent"?
Alas, if only it had tried to become the next Spring Awakening
instead.