Review - Spring Awakening, Novello Theatre

I'm Just a Teenage Dirtbag ,baby!

You can see why I thought I was on to a winner by persuading the Silver-Fox to visit The Novello Theatre for the press night of the multi Tony award-winning ("the best new musical I've seen in years" Mark Shenton) Spring Awakening. Because these are not members of the fresh-faced-making -their-professional-theatrical-debut cast, no!

These are pupils at the school beloved Silver actually attended, Christ's Hospital, in Sussex and this is what he actually wore. Though he is not in the picture

This is the cast.
See what I mean?

Maybe the evening would prove a trip down scholastic memory lane with tales of midnight feasts and tuck shops and roastings in the dorms. Well James Robertson Justice how wrong could a girl be?

To misquote Boney M....."O Those Germans".

It's crap being a teenager; bad hair, bad clothes, bad teachers, all the hormones in the world and no where to put them. If only someone could write a great musical about being young and in love and misunderstood, maybe adapted from a great play! Oh, I forgot they did..Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein and West Side Story.

The songs in Spring Awakening are the kind of adolescent soft-rock that you hear in shopping malls, immediately gettable and instantly forgettable.The lyrics think they're shocking and radical and they may be if you are fourteen and saying fuck very loudly in front of your parents over and over again gives you a hard on. Speaking of which, Mark Ravenhill handled synchronised masturbation much more enjoyably in Over There at The Royal Court.

It's a musical for people who don't like musicals, for people who really want to be rock stars. The themes are dark; suicide, teenage pregnancy, abortion leading to death but the show is as deep as a teenager's mood swing and just as interesting.

What did we like? The cast are fresh and energetic, Bill T Jones' choreography in "The Bitch of Living" (surely a shoo-in for our next Eurovision entry?) was a highlight, the set and lighting by Christine Jones and Kevin Adams are fun. We were particularly taken by a sideways moving Stannah chair lift creation that crawled across the back wall for no palpable reason, and I loved the innovation of the song list being written on the school blackboard so I could count them off more easily than sneaking a look at my programme too often. The hair products used should get their own credit.

It all ended to a standing ovation, saving S-F and myself , and a reprise of that old crowd pleaser "Totally F***ed". Speaking of which how about the search for the next Connie Fisher/ Lee Mead being based on Spring Awakening and every time one of the contestants is voted off they have to be serenaded by the others singing..."you're f***ed, you're f***ed, you're totally f***ed"?

Turning on Newsnight at home we found the debate being about sex education for the young, with the prospect of abortion clinics being advertised on television. Nothing changes.