On Monday night, the energy on 45th Street was electric. Within the span of one city block, three major musical theater events were taking place. There was the first post-shutdown preview of the gender-bent Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company starring Katrina Lenk and Patti LuPone. Down the block, RENT-heads were gathering for the premiere of Netflix’s Tick Tick… Boom! directed by Lin Manuel-Miranda and starring Andrew Garfield as the late composer Jonathan Larsen. And across the street, the original company of Spring Awakening reunited at the Imperial Theater to benefit The Actor’s Fund.
As someone came of age in the aughts, I knew where I had to be: Spring Awakening. Based on the 1891 German play with the same title, the musical took Broadway by storm in 2007 with its youthful, megawatt cast, rock-tinged score and frank depiction of teenage angst and sexuality. Starring relative unknowns Jonathan Groff, John Gallagher Jr., and a pre-Glee Lea Michele as Melchior, Moritz, and Wendla respectively, the musical won eight Tony Awards including best musical and best supporting actor for Gallagher. Much like RENT did in the ’90s and Hamilton would later do in the 2010s, Spring Awakening imprinted itself in the hearts and minds of millions of impressionable theater kids who wanted to rage against the machine, musical-theater style. I should know, I was one of them.
So it should come as no surprise that when The Actor’s Fund announced it’s one-night-only Spring Awakening semi-staged benefit concert, it sold out in just three hours. While attendees waited for more than an hour to gain entry to the theater, Tony-winner Patina Miller, theater owner Jordan Roth, BAM’s artistic director David Binder, and a bevy of Broadway actors were among those who socialized once inside. Over the loudspeaker an announcer apologized for the delay, explaining that The Actor’s Fund was “just getting our legs back on with special events.” A little before 8:30 p.m., almost an hour and a half after the scheduled 7:00 p.m. start time, the reunion finally began.
And it was well worth the wait. Much like the original Broadway production, the concert opened with Michele’s tender and probing ballad “Mama Who Bore Me.” Since Spring Awakening, Michele has shot to stardom, earning an Emmy nomination for her role as Rachel Berry on Glee. Watching Michele standing on a chair center stage, it felt as though she had something to prove. While somewhat tentative at first, Michele quickly fell into her sweet spot, singing and acting as if nothing had changed in the 15 years since she originated the role of Wendla Bergmann.
Michele’s opener set the tone for the whole evening—a testament to the timelessness of art and talent. With little more than chairs and handheld microphones, the cast and musicians transported the audience back to 2007, sounding almost eerily similar to their younger selves. Skylar Astin, who has starred in Zooey’s Extraordinary Playlist and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, elicited girlish squeals from theatergoers every time he opened his mouth (particularly during the climax of “Touch Me”), while the sexual chemistry between Jonathan B. Wright’s Hanschen and Tony-nominee Gideon Glick’s Ernst in “Word of Your Body (Reprise)” was as flirty and funny as ever. Lilli Cooper and Lauren Pritchard mesmerized with the haunting ballad “Dark I Know Well,” which managed to pack more of an emotional punch than it did when the show first debuted.
And yet not everything was exactly as it was. The sexual relationship between Groff and Michele’s characters raised even more questions about consent when examined under a 2021 lens. The insistence on gender, separating “The Boys” from “The Girls” also felt of a different era. Yet while certain aspects of the show have changed, the magic of Spring Awakening—the central chemistry of its cast—remained intact. The brotherly camaraderie between Groff and Gallagher, the curiosity and connection between Groff and Michele, the heart-wrenching misconnection between Gallagher and Pritchard—who produced the evening with Groff, Tom Hulce and Ira Pittleman—was all still there, stirring the same emotion for the audience.
This emotion came to an explosive, triumphant head with the show’s unofficial anthem “Totally Fucked.” Before Act II, a retrospective video of the cast played, where a baby-faced Groff made the audience laugh with his sheer youth. 15 years later, a visibly older, yet still fairly baby-faced Groff let it rip on the anti-establishment banger, recreating Bill T. Jones’s Tony-winning choreography as if he were a man, well, 15 years younger. When the entire cast joined him on the chorus, jumping and moshing along as if they, too, were 15 years younger, the crowd went wild, leaping to their feet after the number. After the final bows, attendees who were willing to brave the cold got the chance to sing the iconic “Blah Blah Blah” chorus from “Totally Fucked” with cast members who were leading the number from atop a double-decker bus.
For those who missed the Spring Awakening reunion, don’t fret. Radical Media is producing a documentary featuring performances from the event, behind-the-scenes moments, new interviews with the cast, and archival footage from the original staging is slated to hit HBO in 2022.
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