Spring Awakening the musical premired in the US in 2006, after nearly ten years of pre-production. The music and lyrics by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater would go on to inspire many succesful productions of the show, based on the 1891 play of the same title by Frank Wedikind. The 2006 Musical received nearly all positive reviews, despite the somewhat controversial material, the inspiration however, was met with nothing but controversy.
The original text of Widekind's play sent Imperial Germany into a panic for their children's wellbeing, fearing that the text exposed, or even glamorized subjects that had previously been swept under the rug by the german aristocracy and upper middle class. While many themes of both the play and the musical remain controversial, the themes of sex education, child abuse, suicide, and abortion left much of the audience in shock, leading to the play being a massive failure, and outright banned in many institutions. While the musical became a success over a century later, the fact remins that the subjects were, nonetheless, still highly controversial, perhaps more so in today's political climate. Yet the text remains clear in its take on the aproach of creating ignorence as a form of preserving childhood, laying out the story of how said attempts to keep the youth innocent can result in their downfall.Â
At the end of the show, our morals, and their attempted acts of good, are left secondary to the reality:
Refusing to allow teens to understand what is happening to their bodies leads to disaster;
Refusing to veiw children's struggles as worth of concern leads to harm;
And when abortions are looked at as criminal and shameful acts, women may die.
Most of the United States agrees that our children are not well enough protected, and fears what may happen if there is not some form of change in our educational system. Statistics shows that teen suicide is on the rise, and our mental health as a nation is suffering, yet parents are left in fear of how to help their children. Some turn to god, others to therapists, some to medication, and some choose to ignore their teens' struggles whether that be from dismissing them as dramatic or finding said struggles to be the marker of a weak individual. What we can all agree on however, is that we do not want children to die, we do not want young people to suffer, and that life is precious.
Spring Awakening shows us these ideas, it speaks to how no one action was done with completely ill intent. The schoolmaster was trying to ensure his school's rank, Wendla's mother was trying to preserve her child's youth, Moritz' father wanted his son to succeed. It is not the intention of these individuals that was evil, it was a world that gave them no choice that led them to feel that way. There is no puppet master in Spring Awakening, no villian causing all the horror, it is only societal ill, and perceived threats of it, that result in disaster.