Royal Academy of Music – Spring Awakening

Picture: Craig Fuller

Spring Awakening was performed by students from the Royal Academy of Music’s Musical Theatre Company at the Susie Sainsbury Theatre, London.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Just like the No. 9 bus, after waiting for ages two come along at once, the Royal Academy of Music’s version of Spring Awakening and the 15th-anniversary concert at the Victoria Palace, with many of the original West End cast, arrived almost simultaneously.
This much-lauded musical – eight Tonys and a three-year run on Broadway, four Oliviers when transferring less successfully to the West End in 2009 – is a bold choice with its depiction of adolescent anarchy at an elite school in 19th century Germany and not always an easy watch with suicide, under-age sex, masturbation, whipping, forbidden gay love, brutal teachers and back-street abortion on a teenager’s far-from-easy journey of discovery and coming-of-age anxiety.

Steven Sater (book and lyrics) and Duncan Sheik (music) have taken Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play of the same name (Fruhlings Erwachsen in German) and hit it with a punchy pop-rock score played with relish by MD/pianist Felix Elliott and his eight fellow RAM musicians and sung by some of the most thrilling young voices around.

There are two casts of 13 sharing the six performances and I reviewed the Friday squad headed by Lewis Taylor-Rogers as the highly intelligent radical Melchior, Ariana Ortiz-Grace as the innocent but curious Wendla whose uptight mother can’t bring herself to tell her how babies are made, Holly Main-Grant as Ilse, kicked out of an abusive home and now living in an artists’ colony, and John Óg as the tormented daydreamer Moritz.

Director Hannah Chissick has teased nuanced performances from this talented quartet and the rest of a strong cast, Callum Fisher as Ernst and Nicholas Curry as the gay couple Ernst and Hanschen, Sarah Giulianti as Wendla’s abused best friend Martha, Hannah Eve Walker, Osian Clarke, Charlie Weaver, Daisy Snelson, Sam Sayan and Beau Woodbridge.

All are to be commended and the glorious harmonies when they all sang ‘The Song of Purple Summer’ to close the show were beyond thrilling. A special mention to the beautiful vocals of Ortiz-Grace, a big talent in a small frame, and to set and lighting designer Andrew Exeter for inspired, plot-enhancing use of shadow and shade.

As someone new to Spring Awakening, it took a while to get to grips with the characters and what exactly was going on, but my own awakening coincided with a belter of a second act that ticked all the boxes. This was the first of two summer RAM musicals. Coming up at the end of June: Into the Woods.

Jeremy Chapman