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The rock musical, "Spring Awakening" was a great hit on Broadway for several years and in 2011 was touring the United States with great success. It is based on a controversial play by Frank Wedekind, a German dramatist of the very
late-19th and early-20th century, about coming of age and sexual repression in a small German town. Wedekind wrote numerous plays, but they were stahed in censored versions if at all The American musical, following the play, features a group of German adolescents who discover their own true natures and beliefs with tragic results. The American musical is set at the turn-of-the 20th century when it first appeared. Conflict with teachers and parents is a vital part of the story. The play raises a range of interesting questions, but unfortunatwly provides simplistic, stock answers. The boys are costumed in knee pants suits which I suposed in intended to convey both period dress and oppression. It is true that quite old American boys might wear knee pants at the turn-of-the 20th century. This was less common in Germany. And the suggestion of a school uniform was also not a good representation of German schoolwear.
The rock musical, "Spring Awakening" was a great hit on Broadway for several years and in 2011 was touring the United States with great success. It is based on a controversial play by Frank Wedekind, a German dramatist of the very
late-19th century, about coming of age and sexual repression in a small German town. The play was first staged in Germany during the early-1900s.
Frank Wedekind is a now respected German dramtist. In his day, he and his played were reviveled by polite German bourgeoisiesociety. Most saw them as licentious if not phornographic. The issues he raised can now be discussed. In his day theu could not be openly confronted. It was not possible to stage his plays in Germany, except in ensored productions. This would have been the same in America and other European countries. He addressed issues of sexual freedom and release, sexual aspects of, an even moments of ecstasy between the sexes. He raises misunderstanding anong genders and violence. Dram scholars today describe his language as 'brilliant and poetic'. It is often difficult to differentiate to separate the literay assessments of modern critics with their general agreement with the ideas Wedekind presented in his plays. His style was often sticato-like cascades of one-line sentences, actually often consisting of only one or two words. One assessment describes them as akin to 'verbal exchanges between pistols'. His plays broke are described as breaking the 'clichés' of the theatre of his day. We might use 'conventions' rather than clichés. He is considered by most drama historians as one of the founders of modern drama. Bertolt Brecht attended Wedekind's funeral in 1918. The entry Brecht's dairy read, "They stood perplexed in top hats, as if round the carcass of a vulture. Bewildered crows."
Wedekind's masterpiece is 'Spring Awakening', 'Frülings Erwachen' in the original German. He wrote the play in 1901 and produced (very briefly) in Berlin a few years later although quickly shut down because of the radical content. The play deals with German adolescents who discover their own true natures and beliefs with tragic results. Conflict with teachers and parents is a vital part of the story. It is based on a controversial play by Frank Wedekind, a German dramatist of the very late-19th and early-20th century, about coming of age and sexual repression in a small German town. Wedekind wrote numerous plays, but they were stahed in censored versions if at all. The school is pictured as highly authoritarian bordering on brutality. The parents are presented as
belonging to a repressive conventionality and a culture of hypocrisy regarding sexual reality. They are not wholly without compassion for their own children, but they are locked into a culture of fear about what neighbors would say and enslaved to conservative middle class opinion. One of the mothers is responsible for her preganant daughter's death and one of the boys commits suicide because his teachers can't recognize the boy's adolescent problems and originality.
The American musical, following the play, features a group of German adolescents who as in the original play discover their own true natures. The musical is set at the turn-of-the 20th century when it was written. Conflict with teachers and parents is a vital part of the story. It follows the original play very
closely and has pretty much the same moral emphasis. A reader writes, "It certainly is not plugging for a lack of discipline in teenage culture as some rock musicals do. It is just really adding music to Wedekind's original
play--even if the the music is somewhat orgiastic. But it is generally faithful to Wedekind's play in all essentials."
The rock musical, "Spring Awakening" raises a range of interesting questions. Specifically Wedekind focuses on the at the time taboo topic of the complexities of adolescent sexuality and growing up. This is part of the author's larger criticism of German narrow-mindedness and lack of imagination on the part of parents and teachers in a very conservative culture. The author is higly critical of German schools at the time and depicts a teacher's brutal treatement of his students. The play pleads by implication for greater tolerance and a more realistic recognition of the sexual nature of boys and girls in their teens-- at the time a taboo topic and one thar\t is still controversial in our society today. The play highlights how tragic the failure to be honest about such problems can become.
The boys in the rock musical are costumed in knee pants suits which I suposed is intended to convey both period dress and oppression. This is not really accurate and we think that it is an editorial statement by the producers rather than something Wedekind intended in his original play. It is true that quite old American boys might wear knee pants at the turn-of-the 20th century. This was less common in Germany. And the suggestion of a school uniform was also not a good representation of German schoolwear. Very prominent are a group of teenage schoolboys (in a secondary school) who attend an extremely repressive and conservative school (boys only ofcourse, as was the custom of the time). They wear dark suits with knickers and long black or at least very dark stockings. Many German boys of this age wore knee trousers rather than knickers, but, apart from this detail, the costuming seems reasonably historical. The images gere look like a school uniform. A reader writes, "You may be right about the boys wearing uniforms in this picture. In the production I saw recently, the boys dressed similarly but not identically. Some for instance wore suspenders while others did not, and the neckties and the color of the stockings varied slightly. My sense is that the similarity of dress is meant to suggest uniformity without an actual uniform being officially required. It is certainly true that German public schools for teenagers during the period did not have an official uniform." I don't think Wedekind suggests that the boys were wearing uniforms in the play. We suspect that the producers have it in their mind that uniforms are an aspect of oppressive schools.
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