“This performance is not suitable for children under the age of 16…and includes references to genitalia, sexual abuse, homelessness, and abortion.”
Covering the bottom third of the promotional website for Spring Awakening, the content warning for the show reads like the text at the end of a pharmaceutical advertisement. I walked into the main stage at the American Repertory Theater nervous to experience this mythical theatrical event. The original play was banned in Germany for being too pornographic. Every performance afterward has been heavily censored or received some sort of outrage. Even the modernized musical, given a pop-punk score in the wake of the Columbine shooting, had to release a heavily edited “school edition” despite winning eight Tonys.
Harvard Radcliffe Dramatic Club’s (HRDC) only musical to grace the 550-person-capacity Loeb Drama Center this season, “Spring Awakening” places sex and violence at its center. Warning against the dangers of societal silence, the musical tells a coming-of-age story focused on a group of German schoolchildren. Though nominally set in the 19th century, timelessness is at the center of the production. The visual language communicates a world just a little further behind ours today, but a world that will persist past our time. Wide Dickie shorts cuffed barely two inches above the knees define the silhouette of young schoolboys discovering wet dreams for the first time. The shadows cast by the stage lights hitting the short’s fabric make the boys’ legs look like they are always shaking, reminding me of the feeling of precarity that puberty invokes.
But Director Grace Allen ’24 and her team go beyond just the male experience (which has been developed plenty by previous major productions). The team specially attends to the experience of the adolescent women in the story, who deal directly with miseducation, social pressure, physical abuse, sexual coercion, and, in one case, a deadly back-alley abortion. Green room conversations with the cast revealed an intentional directing practice that placed actor safety at the forefront of the production process.
While I watched the cast warm up, the trust they had built with each other over a relatively luxurious rehearsal window was evident. Despite the gravity and gruesome nature of the show’s content, the entire production team is prepared to take risks for each other. These risks play out beautifully on stage, like during a bone-chilling performance of “The Dark I Know Well.” The rendition, led by a breathtaking Andreea Haidau ’26 (Martha Bessell) and a forceful Hannah Alexis ’27 (Ilse Neumann), sounds like a substantial departure from the original 2006 score. Musical directors Fahim Ahmed ’25, Joe Bradley ’25, and Henry Wu ’25 have given sonic space to feel the vulnerability in Haidau’s voice and the resilience in Alexis’s.
While the music throughout the entire two hours is often bombastic and benefits from the talented ensemble, in the dress rehearsal I watched, the deeply thoughtful choreography was incongruous with some of the excellent blocking. Even sitting in an 11-person crowd, the punk energy during “Totally F****d” at the climax of the show almost compelled me to jump out of my seat and sing along. But, this energy was developed by letting the cast run wild, jumping in tandem with the energy of the live eight-person band on stage with them. Throughout the rest of the show, the rewarding choreography was characterized by large sweeping arm movements and relatively restrained lower bodies. However, without performers moving with their base, group choreography repeatedly evoked a helical motif which often distracted from sensitive scenes involving incredibly nuanced acting that had clearly been developed with care. Despite this, I enjoyed the decision to introduce some asynchrony in the actors’ movement. The pattern of dancers diverging and converging to rhythm surfaced each character’s individuality through what could have easily been anonymizing set pieces.
The legibility of every performer’s individuality is ultimately what sells this production. Often musicals rely on hero performances, but Spring Awakening demands that every actor step up to the occasion. To be clear, the lead performers are successful. Leading man Jonah Sorscher ’25 (Melchior Gabor) delivers something reminiscent of Timothée Chalamet’s performance in The French Dispatch, and Nikhil Kamat ’25 (Moritz Stiefel) executes a convincingly tragic descent into suicide. The entire musical hinges on Shannon Harrington’s ’26 (Wendla Bergmann) incredibly layered depiction of a girl becoming a woman while desperately holding on to her identity.
And still, the rest of the cast demands to be seen and heard. The Independent’s own Editor-in-Chief Andrew Spielmann ’25 (Hanschen Rilow) provides a scintillating simulation of boyish autoerotic manipulation. Anna Fitzsimmons ’25 (Frau Gabor) holds the emotional throughline of the script while balancing on the edge of an oedipal mother. Every cast member stands up to contribute a memorable moment.
So, I am left wanting more time. I want to get to know these characters better. In some sense, I feel rushed from emotional payoff to emotional payoff. In another sense, I understand this is the compromise of student theater—I cannot ask the sound designer to add more to the 300 cues this musical already uses. Ultimately, this desire for more is the struggle this show is taking on. It is asking me to become alongside the players, knowing I will always be rushed.
Spring Awakening opened on April 3 and runs until April 6.
Noah Tavares ’24 (noahtavares@college.harvard.edu) cannot be fired from the Independent and so remained completely honest and totally subjective.