Jonathan Franzen Rips B'way Spring Awakening

Any doubts I ever had about Spring Awakening's chances on Broadway can now be officially laid to rest: it just recouped. But it was no sure thing. In previews it reportedly lost $700,000 of its initial $6 mil investment. What saved it? Apparently, says NY Post's Michael Riedel, the "yutes":

For one thing, Spring Awakening really did manage to tap into an audience that's much younger than the typical Broadway crowd. And it did so largely through the Internet.

A clip of the show on YouTube, illegally swiped from the Tony Awards in June, has received more than 100,000 hits. And there are video and audio clips from the show all over MySpace.

MTV, which pays scant attention to Broadway, did a major piece on Spring Awakening that, says Pittelman, sent the box office soaring.

And even through the ups and downs of the doldrums of summer, it's been playing strong to full houses.

So there you have it. Instead of infantilizing geezers with cotton candy, we have young audiences flocking to challenging 19th century German source material to a rock beat.... Is Broadway growing up, as it were? Well, not so fast, if you remember what had to be done to Wedekind's original Frühlings Erwachen to make it play on the Rialto. And who else should come along and remind us about that than... Jonathan Franzen?

It's true, Jonathan Franzen has just written his own translation (soon to be published) of the original 1891 Frank Wedekind play (yes, he apparently knows German, it's not a lazy "adapt" job) and writes a very insightful introduction about the piece. Including a number of zingers calling out the current musical! At length. To wit:

One example of the ongoing danger and vitality of Spring Awakening was the insipid rock-musical version of it that opened on Broadway in 2006, a hundred years after the play's world premiere, and was instantly overpraised. The script that Wedekind had finished in 1891 was far too frank sexually to be producible on any late-Victorian stage... And yet even the cruelest bowdlerizations of a century ago [i.e., the early censored versions] were milder than the maiming a dangerous play now undergoes in becoming a contemporary hit.

The hand-wringing young Moritz Stiefel, whom Wedekind had kill himself over a bad report card, is transformed, in the musical version, into a punk rocker of such talent and charisma that it's unimaginable that a report card could depress him. The casual rape of Wendla Bergmann by the play's central character, Melchior Gabor, becomes a thunderous spectacle of ecstasy and consent. And where Wedekind showed the young sensualist Hansy Rilow resisting masturbation -- reluctantly destroying a piece of pornography that threatens to "eat away" his brain -- we in the twenty-first century are treated to a choreographed orgy of penis-pumping, semen-slinging exultation... As for the working-class girl Martha Bessel, who in the original play is beaten by her father and ardently envied for these beatings by the bourgeois masochist Wendla Bergmann: what else could she become in 2006 but a saintly young emblem of sexual abuse? Her supportive, sisterly friends join her in singing "The Dark I Know Well," an anthem to the sorrow of being carnally interesting to grown-ups. Instead of Martha's appalling matter-of-factness about her home life... there is now a dense modern fog of sentimentality and bad faith.

and then...

A team of grown-ups creates a musical whose main selling point is teen sex (the first Broadway posters showed the male lead mounting the female lead) and whose female teen characters, shortly after wailing to their largely grown-up audience that they are bad-girl love-junkies, come forward to sing of how terribly, unfairly painful it is to possess a teen sexuality that fascinates grown-ups. If the path from Bratz dolls through Britneywear finally leaves a girl feeling like somebody else's piece of meat, it obviously can't be commercial culture's fault, because commercial culture has such a rockin' great sound track and nobody understands teenagers better than commercial culture does, nobody admires them more than it does, nobody works harder to make them feel authentic, nobody insists more strenuously that young consumers are always right, whether as moral heroes or as moral victims.... In the end, the only thing that really matters to teenagers is that they be taken very seriously. And here, among all the ways in which Spring Awakening would seem to be unsuitable material for a commercial rock musical, is Frank Wedekind's most grievous offense: he makes fun of teenagers -- flat-out laughs at them -- to the same degree that he takes them seriously. And so now, more than ever, he must be censored.

First of all, I think this is first lengthy serious analytical response to the musical Spring Awakening I've seen in print. And since it's a notable phenomenon on B'way, it's worth paying this much attention to. That it's by a famous literary fiction author is also heartening, since we need more of this "crossover" and conversation between artists of all media and genres. We need the arts to pay attention to each other, in other words.

Franzen's views on Wedekind and the musical are highly personal, of course. While I tend to agree with most of his diagnosis of the musical's watering down the play, I actually don't for a moment think these changes were made purely for commercial reasons. I mean, no one would even start writing a musical of Spring Awakening if they wanted to make millions. I really think that for the personnel most responsible -- Duncan Sheik, Steven Sater, and director Michael Mayer -- they genuinely like their version better.

(True, the act one finale, the rape/non-rape scene, seems to have been tinkered with extensively between the first staging and Broadway previews. Perhaps some commercial pressure was brought to bear on that.)

I don't think it has to do not with conscious "selling out" so much as the current sensibility of American theatre artists as opposed to a German rebel from a hundred years ago. As Americans are we so inculcated with the cultural and narrative values sanctioned "family entertainment" that we crave more. And when faced with a radically different vision from another time, we rush to assimilate it to the more familiar, and less threatening.

One thing I do agree with Franzen about is that the current version may be explicit but it is not disturbing. A great production of the real Spring Awakening would fascinate teenagers, but also challenge, not flatter them.

As opposed to (as Riedel reports):

Walk by the stage door after any performance, and you'll see hordes of kids waiting to meet the cast. Once upon a time, they would have thrust out their Playbills for an autograph. Now, they whip out their cellphones and take picture of themselves with the actors.

I haven't read Franzen's translation yet, by the way. But I'm curious. He claims it's the first "complete" English version that restores all the parts cut by censors over the years...

PS. After my printing of the extended quotations on my Playgoer blog Thursday, NY Post picked up this story in the Labor Day edition of Page Six.

Comments

[fishmonger19]

I'm so glad whenever someone has something less than glowing to say about SPRING AWAKENING. I saw one of the first previews and was so bored and insulted and dismayed and unimpressed that I came very close to leaving during intermission. I'm a huge fan of racy, sexually-charged theatre, too (and I love the original script), but this new musical was so obviously geared for the RENT-crowd with its conventional envelope-pushing. I didn't see anything new or shocking (or, really, honest) in the whole damned thing. Teenagers are sexually repressed? Wow, thanks. They're frustrated? Wonderful. Anything else near to the play's message was jettisoned to fit the twenty-odd songs (which are lovely, by the way, but wholly incongruous and don't further the story by any stretch of the imagination). It's easy, by the numbers rebellion, once again, as toothless as Avril Lavigne's eyeliner. And don't get me started on the friggin' hand-held mics . . .

[CJGibson]

To a degree isn't this the same old Brothers Grimm vs. Disney debate that we've always had?

[devora]

Franzen ought to keep doing the crossover b/c altho he is not always kind, he is always insightful. Every non-fiction piece I've read of his is challenging. He dares us to stay educated, to not give in to the easy, cheapness off pop culture.

[Aunt Shecky]

I agree with you and apparently Jonathan Franzen that much of our culture is "watered down." I wonder why, for instance, Elton John,
believed he needed to rewrite Aida.
I probably have no business commenting, because there is no way on God's good earth that I could afford to go to a Broadway show.
(But if I were granted the opportunity, I would
prefer Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia to
Spring Awakening.­)
If I'm not mistaken, Franzen wouldn't have gotten the translating gig were it not for the success of Spring Awakening. It seems bad form to criticize the "springboard" to his success.
And if I remember correctly, was it not Franzen
who spurned Oprah's invitation for one of his novels to be a selection of her book club. I fully understand his reasoning for refusing to accept the honor, BUT after struggling for a lifetime to jumpstart a writing career, if I scored a break that big, I would
get on my knees and thank the God of my Choice
for such good fortune.

[priorzola]

There was once a time when theatre, especially, but story-telling, in general had more faith and respect of intelligence for it's audience. Playwrights from Shakespeare to Harold Pinter; writers from Dickens to Steinbeck, understood the allegorical nature of their work. They, as did their readers and viewers, knew that what happens in these stories is meant as a parable, that these stories are meant to set an example of what to do and what not to do in a certain very human situation.

Today's audience doesn't want to learn from story-telling so much as identify with the characters. There's nothing wrong with that, but invoking too much of your own experience and trying to extract too many of your own personal emotional needs from what is essentially entertainment (profound or not) can be dangerous.

It means that modern-day storytellers tip toe around the offensive and try their best to make the protaganist more heroic than human. Much of the audience can't stand to see awful things happen to people they like, especially if these awful things go unpunished (although awful things in real life very often do go unpunished and often are rewarded).

I have a friend who is a screenwriter and he said that if he were to write a film were the lead character, his mother, his uncle, his girlfriend, his girlfriend's father, his girlfriend's brother, his two best friends and his whole nation's army dies, they would never make that film. But that is essentially the plot of Hamlet, one of the greatest stories of the English language.

Shakespeare wrote about a once-naive young prince becoming aware of the duplicitous nature of power, whose only reaction is to seek revenge that causes bloody mayhem along the way. In order to truly explore those themes, bad people have to be rewarded for terrible crimes, good people have to do bad things in revolt, many people have to die and everyone loses sight of the bigger picture putting a whole nation's security in jeopardy. Thsi story wouldn't have the impact if you soften the horror.