Following in the footsteps of the original production—which launched the careers of Jonathan Groff, Lea Michele, and John Gallagher Jr., among others—Taymor and the producers landed on their cast after holding an open call for fresh faces this summer. Two performers were selected from the roughly 2,500 unknowns who auditioned: Antonio Porciello will play Hänschen, and 18-year-old Jack Bateman will defer his freshman year of college to play Georg.
Rounding out the cast are Khadija Sankoh as Martha, Leif Coomer as Ernst, Nando Morland as Otto, Grace Slear as Anna, and Jada Simone Clark as Thea.
It’s practically unheard of for a contemporary musical to be revived so often, so soon. But Spring Awakening has always been a hallowed rarity: a refreshingly frank rock musical about troubled teens discovering the pains and pleasures of sex, based on an oft-banned Frank Wedekind play from 1891 Germany. Taymor tells Vanity Fair that though her career has veered toward directing new plays, she grew up a lover of musicals. It was while preparing for The Outsiders that she reconnected to the form, in part because her friend, the director Annie Tipp, played the original Spring Awakening cast recording for them during a road trip around that time. “I was like, Oh, no, I know every word of this,” Taymor says. “This is deeply in my DNA.”
With her reputation for visceral explorations of adolescence, it’s no surprise that Taymor began to envision “an embodied version with lots of movement,” rooted in visions of forests: “The wildness of childhood that we all experience, and how that butts up against the structure of society—the opposite of nature.” Spring Awakening’s original production memorably used original choreography by dance trailblazer Bill T. Jones to convey its characters’ yearning, and Taymor has tapped The Testament of Ann Lee’s Celia Rowlson-Hall for this production. For Taymor, the choreographer is a kindred spirit: Her movement is deeply of the earth, and also capable of drawing out inchoate feelings from unlikely places. (See also Rowlson-Hall’s work in the “Beach House” episode of Girls.)
Rowlson-Hall says she went over each scene with Taymor, figuring out which movements might be lurking inside of the characters. They then worked on incorporating those movements into the choreography. This Spring Awakening, she says, will be a “much more woodsy, natural interpretation.” (In conversations with the show’s team, the word “embodied” comes up again and again.) The two are keen to maintain an element of surprise, but the hiring of scenic designers Christine Jones and Brett Banakis, who were partly responsible for The Outsiders’ gravel-strewn junkyard set, points to an environmental staging. (So does an anonymous source who simply said, “There’s dirt on the ground.”)
Aside from two as-yet uncast adult characters, all but two members of the young cast of 11 are under 26. They’re mostly too young to remember the jingoistic Bush era into which Spring Awakening was unleashed, or that there was a time when a Broadway musical could whip up enough cultural fervor to warrant three Gap billboards in Times Square. The original production took off in part because there were parallels between the real world and the restrictiveness and sex negativity in the world of the play. But while it was ostensibly condemned and certainly politicized, back then, teen sexuality was also much more visible in media.
Wesley and Porciello both say they discovered the show through Rise, a 2018 NBC drama based on a Pennsylvania high school’s struggle to mount a production of the controversial musical. “Growing up, I would search roles for Black actors, so Spring Awakening was not one that would pop up,” Wesley says. “But that show showcased a Black Melchior [Damon J. Gillespie]. So that, coupled with the themes of the show—how it approached sexuality, teen angst, and coming of age—was interesting to me.”
