Spring Awakening is a musical by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater. The production in Vienna is in German and stars Rasmus Borkowski, Hanna Kastner, Wolfgang Türks and Julia Stemberger. It’s based on Frank Wedekind‘s play.
Plot:
Wendla [Hanna Kastner], Melchior [Rasmus Borkowski] and Moritz [Wolfgang Türks] are teenagers at the end of the 19th century. They grow up in a (sexual) void – nobody tells them about sexuality. So they have to find things out for themselves – which doesn’t end very well.
Melchior is an atheist and rebel who, unlike most kids his age, knows about sex. Moritz, his classmate, is shy and haunted by erotic dreams he can neither understand nor handle and which make him fail school. And Wendla doesn’t even know where babies come from.
I’ve never read/seen the play, though I’ve been meaning to for a while. Judging by the musical, the play must be really very good.
The musical itself had some issues, most of which are production specific problems – the translation was horrible and the cast was pretty forgettable. [But worst offender was the choreography in my opinion (which seems to be international).] But apart from that, it was entertaining and the music is pretty good.
[SPOILERS]
Okay, let’s talk about the translation first: Please, dear musical writers: DON’T EVER DO IT! In the best case, you don’t want to hit your head repeatedly against the seat in front of you. In the worst case, these original lines (which are not the best anyway)
and mares will neigh
with stallions that they mate
foals they’ve borne
become
and the mare will see her foal jumping round the stallion [und die Stute wird ihr Fohlen um den Hengst springen sehen]
which physically hurts.
There was a lot of that stuff going on. In any case, I do think that music’s rather nice in the original version, but in German I was just too distracted by the lyrics.
Let’s talk about the cast. For some reason, the casting director(s) saw fit to cast the good singers into the supporting roles. Hanna Kastner was pretty mediocre, as was Wolfgang Türks. Rasmus Borkowski was fine until he had to sing some high notes, then it really, really hurt to hear his voice straining, straining, and ultimately failing…
Julia Stemberger, who is otherwise a fine actress, had to play multiple roles and you couldn’t tell one role from the other. It always took me a while to find out who she was embodying in that instance.
But in the supporting casts, there were some real talents – especially Matthias Bollwerk (Ernst), Sonja Dengler (Martha) and Jeannine Wacker (Thea).
I really liked the stage design – I thought it looked really cool and that it was so minimalistic didn’t hurt the whole thing at all. The light was expertly used and made it look like there were some different stages anyway.
The choreography, as I said before was bewildering bordering on the very-very-very-very-very-strange. There wasn’t a lot of dancing, which I find disappointing anyway, but when there was dancing, it was some weird arm-stroking-along-the-body action. What can I say? It just left me scratching my head. And it wasn’t aesthetically pleasing either.
This might sound like it’s the worst musical ever – which it isn’t. But it’s always easier to write about the bad stuff, isn’t it?
Apart from the show, I have to talk a bit about the audience. It was mostly filled with teenagers, which is usually a bad thing (sorry, but it’s true. People in groups are horrible, but teenagers in groups are insupportable). But some of the audience reactions were nevertheless worrying.
First, there’s the scene were Melchior beats up Wendla – they actually start laughing (and it’s not the embarassed “I don’t know how to handle this” laughter. It’s “haha, a guy beating a girl, that’s funny!” laughter). [Thank goodness, die andere lena had warned me about that. So I didn’t throw up. But I really had to grip my seat tightly.]
[To contrast that reaction – in an earlier scene, Melchior gets beaten by his teacher, far less severely I might add, and the audience gasped in outrage.]
At another point, Hänschen and Ernst kissed. Their relationship was hinted at earlier, but it was in the second half of the second act that you actually saw anything for the first time. And the audience first gasped in surprise [huuuuuuuh! A GAY KISS!], then they started cheering. I’m sorry, but isn’t that normal nowadays? I mean, how often have we seen gay kisses in movies recently? Does nobody watch these? Do gay love scenes/kiss scenes still have that Wow! factor? That’s so sad.
And then they actually gave the play standing ovations. And it so didn’t deserve these… It was fine, but not good enough for actual standing ovations.
Oh well. I guess there are better productions out there and I sure as hell hope that there are better audiences out there.
What I find remarkable though, is that this play is about a hundred years old, and still we have the same problems – though usually not as excessive as in this case. Parents still are ashamed to talk about sex with their kids. Kids still get punished for being sexual beings. And in the end, it’s all completely fucked.
kalafudra's Stuff 
Thank you for writing this review. I was curious about the Austrian production. I saw the musical Spring Awakening on a trip to New York. I am in love with Frühlings Erwachen, which I first read when I was twelve years old. I expected to hate the musical, so it was rather amazing to see how well the pop/rock score fit in with the text as a kind of Brechtian commentary on the action. (The gay scenes are in the Wedekind text. The ending of the musical is less “expressionistic” than the original text.) One could see that Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater loved the play. And yes, there is no anachronism. This is a play that was censored as late as 1963 in England!
I ordered the Austrian album, which arrived this week. This is perverse on my part, wanting to see what Austrians would do with a German play that had been Americanized. I too had a bad reaction to some of the translations, but then I don’t get to hear much German pop. (I get to hear Wagner, Schubert Lieder, Lehar operetta, that sort of thing.) A number of songs are missing on the German Cast Album. On the other hand, there are long pieces of dialogue that are not on the American album. The effect is that “play” seems much more “desperate,” “angry,” “real” in German. Maybe I am making things up in my mind, but the German speaking cast sounded as I think Wedekind’s characters should sound. The German-speaking Wendla is more convincing when she loses her virginity. She really doesn’t know what is coming. When the American actor who plays Moritz says he has to write an essay on the Hapsburgs, does he know who the Hapsburgs are and what they represent? The English-speaking Moritz is cool in a different sort of way, an outsider. The German-speaking Moritz seems hapless, incompetent, repugnant as he is in the Wedekind play. He can’t stand being Moritz. His death is not just a protest. And when he meets Elsa as he prepares to kill himself, he is really freaked, out of control. The American teenager is just sad and the American Elsa could be out of one of those American TV series. Rasmus Borkowski, on disc, is more credible as Melchior if less beautiful than his American counterpart, who is sophomoric in comparison, and much to androgynous. Yes, the translations of the songs seem square, but all in all, it moved me. Wedekind seemed to be going home.
Wow, you gave that really a lot of thought!
Now that you’ve had more time to listen to the Austrian record, do you still agree?
Hi.
I like the German album more and more despite its limitations. I have a German friend here in Brazil. (I’m an American.) He prefers the English lyrics. The Austrian recording is live, so there is a sense of theatre even if the recording of the band can be irritating. There are also great cuts. I imagine things went wrong on the nights of the recording and certain songs were left out, to be replaced by dialogue. There was room for another 25 minutes of material. Nevertheless, certain tracks of the Austrian cast album are on my ipod in lieu of the American. When my German friend who is fluent in English and Portuguese heard Diese Welt for the first time, he exclaimed “How German!” That is the way I think it is suppose to be.
Frühlings Erwachen is a very great play that has been given a “bum rap”. When the play wasn’t censored outright, it was accused of being passé. I think one of the important questions of the postwar years is what does it mean for something to be passé. Most works are born passé nowadays. I think Frühlings Erwachen achieves its greatness the way any work does, by being very specific, late 19th Germany, and thus by being specific achieves a universality. This is what I felt when I read the play for the first time in 1964 at a time when I had been sent off to a reform school. I was fourteen. There was no question that I was Melchior and that the Man in Black who saved Melchior saved me. (Wedekind himself? The final scenes of musical are much more conventional than the original play, at least on Broadway, for the cemetery number is missing on the Austrian disc.) So there is no question in my mind that Rasmus Borkowski, and especially Wolfgang Türks, sound right. It is just my guess, but I think the Austrian cast read the Wedekind and took it seriously. I doubt the American kids did. They are playing at being German and not very seriously. The really know they are American adolescents in the age of American Idol. The American Moritz won prizes, but he seems much more Holden Caulfeld than a boy so uptight that he will kill himself rather than fuck. Even with cuts Mach nicht auf traurig is impressive. This boy is going to kill himself. It is not cool at all. You never think that about the American boy. The dialog that appears in Ich Vertrau, which is not included on the American album is so honest and sounds so good in German that it makes me regret so much time spent on Portuguese and French. I would love to sound like this Melchior sounds.
I think Europeans might find themselves more critical with any translation, especially a back translation. (I mean this is what is interesting. Do you know the different versions of Salomé to French? Strauss went out of this way to prepare score suitable to Wilde’s French, only to find years later a back translation to French from German.) It is also true that my German ear is third rate and I have weird ideas of how to improve it. The recording of Goethe’s Faust with Gustaf Gründgens should arrive here from amazon.de any day. It is not just the verse. Maybe it is time for me to sell my soul. :-D
Sorry for taking so much time getting back to you.
P.S. I just repeated what I said in August. So much for reading what I wrote after writing again. Spring Awakening didn’t make it in London. I am going up to Rio de Janeiro to see the Brazilian production in a few weeks.
Don’t worry about it!
Brazil? How cool is that?! I lived there for about a year, almost 10 years ago and then never made it back (at least, not yet). Saudade…
Anyway, regarding translations: I think it’s interesting that you raise the point that Europeans seem more critical about translations. In my experience, Europeans don’t really care a whole lot about them(for example, it’s been only about 10 or 15 years that it’s customary to mention the translator in books that have been translated).
But having so many countries with so many different languages on such small a room as in Europe, you’re confronted with the issue of translation almost all the time. There’s not a carton of milk you can buy without it having at least three languages on it.
And that doesn’t happen in the US, or in other English speaking countries (for the most part). Which makes the issue of translation in Europe (excluding UK and Ireland for now) an everyday thing not to be thought about and in the English speaking countries it’s more special and needs to be remarked upon.
At least that’s how it feels to me.
[I studied comparative literature for a while and that’s when I really noticed the difference a translation can make for the first time. Since then, my senses are pretty honed regarding that.]
Translating back is of course even more difficult.
—
And I really don’t think that Frühlings Erwachen is in any form passé. Be it the play itself or the musical. In fact, it’s frightening how current it still seems to be.
—
Anyways, have fun with Goethe and Gründgens! [Though I have to admit that this may not be the easiest way to learn German… ;)]
Oh, I’m so glad I found a review of this in English. This is one of my favorite musicals, and I thought it sounded much more natural in German. Shame about the translation. :( Out of curiosity, what were some of the other translations/were there any lines that were translated well?
Goodness, I’m sorry, but I don’t remember. It’s been 9 months since I’ve seen the play and I haven’t listened to the German version since…
Of course, it’s extremely hard to translate lyrics, so you could probably take every line and rip it apart if you’re so inclined. ;)