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    Spring Awakening
    Spring Awakening
    Spring Awakening
    Ebook161 pages1 hour

    Spring Awakening

    By Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    “This brave new musical, haunting and electrifying by turns, restores the mystery, the thrill to that shattering transformation that stirs in all our souls.”—Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

    “The staggering purity of this show will touch all open hearts…In its refined, imaginative simplicity, it daringly reverses all the conventional rules by returning the American musical to an original state of innocence.”—John Heilpern, The New York Observer

    “An unexpected jolt of sudden genius, edgy in its brutally honest, unromanticized depiction of human sexuality.”—New York Post

    Spring Awakening is an extraordinary new rock musical with book and lyrics by Steven Sater and music by Grammy Award-nominated recording artist Duncan Sheik. Inspired by Frank Wedekind’s controversial 1891 play about teenage sexuality and society’s efforts to control it, the piece seamlessly merges past and present, underscoring the timelessness of adolescent angst and the universality of human passion.

    Steven Sater’s plays include the long-running Carbondale Dreams, Perfect for You, Doll (Rosenthal Prize/Cincinnati Playhouse), Umbrage (Steppenwolf New Play Prize), and a reconceived version of Shakespeare’s Tempest, which played in London.

    Duncan Sheik is a singer/songwriter who also collaborated with Sater on the musical The Nightingale. He has composed original music for The Gold Rooms of Nero and for The Public Theater’s Twelfth Night in Central Park.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTheatre Communications Group
    Release dateSep 1, 2007
    ISBN9781559366229
    Spring Awakening

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    Reviews for Spring Awakening

    4.5/5

    42 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      read it to better understand the musical. i should have put the music on when the songs came up, but simply reading the libretto came up flat.
    • 5/5
      Loved looking at the words themselves an d absorbing them

    Book preview

    Spring Awakening - Steven Sater

    001

    Table of Contents

    Praise

    Title Page

    Dedication

    PREFACE

    SPRING AWAKENING

    ACT ONE

    SCENE 1

    SCENE 2

    SCENE 3

    SCENE 4

    SCENE 5

    SCENE 6

    SCENE 7

    SCENE 8

    SCENE 9

    SCENE 10

    SCENE 11

    ACT TWO

    SCENE 1

    SCENE 2

    SCENE 3

    SCENE 4

    SCENE 5

    SCENE 6

    SCENE 7

    SCENE 8

    SCENE 9

    SCENE 10 - Coda

    Copyright Page

    "A kind of miracle. The staggering purity of this show will touch all open hearts. The melting lament of its confused and damaged youngsters speaks directly to us. In its refined, imaginative simplicity, it daringly reverses all the conventional rules by returning the American musical to an original state of innocence. Spring Awakening is the best new musical I’ve seen in a generation."

    —JOHN HEILPERN, NEW YORK OBSERVER

    An unexpected jolt of sudden genius! A groundbreaking must-see musical sure to wake up Broadway! Edgy in its brutally honest, unromanticized depiction of human sexuality, the night is made heart-rending and magical by themes common to all.

    —CLIVE BARNES, NEW YORK POST

    "Fantastic! Sheer exuberance exploding in a burst of power pop.

    The new indie-rock treatment of Frank Wedekind’s play about

    hormonal adolescents has just about everything going for it.

    Be prepared to say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know musicals could do that.’"

    —JEREMY McCARTER, NEW YORK MAGAZINE

    Tearing into the pretend pop and reused plots that pass for new musicals on Broadway today, this primal scream of turbulent puberty is furious, serious fun.

    —LINDA WINER, NEWSDAY

    "The most explosive new musical since Rent. A gorgeous score. A passionate story. Spring Awakening is a remarkable musical that every generation is likely to appreciate now and in years to come."

    —MICHAEL SOMMERS, STAR-LEDGER (NEWARK)

    "Spring Awakening, with book and lyrics by Steven Sater and superb indie-rock anthems by Duncan Sheik, throbs with dark humor and dangerous desire. The music, alternately brattish punk and yearning power ballads, reaches the heart of Wedekind’s tormented adolescents. Spring Awakening is a cult hit in the making if ever I saw one."

    —CHARLES SPENCER, TELEGRAPH (LONDON)

    The most thrilling pop musical ever. Veteran pop composer Duncan Sheik and lyricist/book writer Steven Sater capture the melancholy and mortification of adolescence with all of the intensity it deserves and none of the condescension it so often receives.

    —ERIC GRODE, NEW YORK SUN

    "I saw Spring Awakening exactly thirty-eight days ago, and

    I haven’t gone a day without replaying it in my head since.

    Two sensuous ballads, ‘Touch Me’ and ‘The Word of Your

    Body,’ are so gorgeous, they already rank among the best ever

    written for the stage. The main love story is nothing short of

    Greek tragedy. Spring Awakening is an intoxicating experience."

    —JOHN MOORE, DENVER POST

    Exhilarating. A show that bristles with rawness, vitality and urgency. Sater’s book and lyrics seem to capture from within the uniquely teenage feeling that every emotion is the most tempestuous, frightening, passionate or exciting one ever experienced.

    —DAVID ROONEY, VARIETY

    "Spring Awakening is a breathtaking dissection of what it means to grow up. In its exploration of new-found sexuality—when everything is extreme, with never a shade of gray—the show rips through the Eugene O’Neill Theatre with pounding intensity. When it is at its alternative-rock best, it sweeps the audience into its beat; when it is at its most poignant, you feel like the only person in the theater."

    —HOWARD SHAPIRO, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

    "Spring Awakening is an extraordinary new musical. Melodies like ‘The Song of Purple Summer’ reach deep inside the listener and stir feelings that may have been sleeping for a long time. It’s what great theater should do. It’s what Spring Awakening does."

    —RICHARD OUZOUNIAN, TORONTO STAR

    Breathtaking. Sheik’s iridescent music and Sater’s imagistic lyrics make everyone recall when they, too, were young, unshakably set on radicalizing the world. It’s electrifying.

    —LEONARD JACOBS, BACKSTAGE

    001

    For my parents; and my children;

    and for you, L...

    —S.S.

    PREFACE

    When we were young Frank Wedekind was the

    Masked Man of our Spring Awakening . . . This was the

    turn of the century. Bourgeois ideas lay in their agony.

    —BERTHOLD VIERTEL (1885-1953), WRITINGS ON THEATRE

    Suffice it to say, by the time I thought of introducing Wedekind’s Masked Man to the American musical theater, those same bourgeois ideas had more than managed to rise again.

    It was indeed the turn of a new century when I first gave Duncan a copy of the play. Some months later, in the wake of the shootings at Columbine, its subject felt all the more urgent; I approached (director) Michael Mayer about working on it with us.

    These days, a short eight years later, in the shadow of the shootings at Virginia Tech, I am often asked why I ever thought Spring Awakening could work as a musical. And my only real answer is that I knew and loved the play, that I had long felt it was a sort of opera-in-waiting, and that somehow I could already hear Duncan’s music in it.

    Subtitled A Children’s Tragedy, Wedekind’s play is full of the unheard, anguished cries of young people. It struck me that pop music—rock music—is the exact place that adolescents for the last few generations have found release from, and expression of, that same mute pain.

    The flesh has its own spirit, Wedekind once wrote. And surely his gorgeous threnody already has the soul of song within it. But I never dreamed that, by letting his characters actually sing, we would end up so profoundly transforming his work.

    Then, perhaps there is something in the nature of song itself that opens the door to story—that admits us to the heart of the singer—as if every song tells of a sort of unacknowledged I want. For, what we sing is what is unspoken, what is hidden. The real story.

    As we began work, I vowed to remain true to Wedekind’s fierce original intent. But I soon found that once we had access, through song, to the inner workings of our characters’ hearts and minds, we engaged with them differently—we embarked on journeys with them. Before

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