http://www.ft.com/cms/s/5bae93a6-ff30-11da-84f3-0000779e2340.html

Financial Times
June 19, 2006
by Brendan Lemon

Spring Awakening - Atlantic Theatre Company New York

The new show by Steven Sater (book and lyrics) and Duncan Sheik (music) may make a bang-up cast album. While waiting for that hoped-for recording, however, the only way to experience Spring Awakening is at off-Broadway's Atlantic Theatre, where it represents the first musical in the company's 20-year history.
Based on Frank Wedekind's controversial play The Awakening of Spring, which was written in 1891 but not produced until 15 years later, the story, according to the publicity material, concerns "the advent of puberty in children". What with all the masturbation, sado-masochism and suicide on display, that is a little like saying that Psycho is about taking a shower. The prurient, however, should be assured that the effect of Spring Awakening is quite sweet. When a lustful kiss between two boys prompts nodding approval from matinee ladies, it may be time to punch up the source material.
Wedekind's play is steeped in German romanticism, although the Goethe cited is not Werther but Faust. Unlike Rent, which updated La bohème, Sater and Sheik do not alter the time-frame of the story: Susan Hilferty's evocative costumes for all these regimented students never let us forget that we are in a provincial German town in the 1890s. Michael Mayer's staging is solid, although the musical often feels a little like a glorified concert rendition. Bill T. Jones's choreography consists mostly of stylised hand movements.
Musically, we are in the world of Joni Mitchell-inflected soft rock and intimate ballads. Sheik's often lovely music captures the whirling emotions of the dozen adolescents on stage more variously than do Sater's attitude-laden lyrics. The creators' canny juxtaposition of 19th- century German repression and 20th-century rock'n'roll rebellion keeps reminding us of the continuity of youthful revolt, whatever its guise.
Jonathan Groff, who plays the musical's precocious lead, conveys his character's emotional ache more sharply than his intellectual edge. Lea Michele sings his virginal sweetheart beautifully and, with his slender frame and startling shock of hair, John Gallagher Jr makes their troubled friend an Egon Schiele drawing sprung to life.