'Spring Awakening' is getting an Off Broadway revival this fall

Audiences (and the Tony Awards) have spoken loud and clear in the last few years, saying/screlting that what the people want is adolescent angst belted as high and as loud as possible. So Spring Awakening has announced, "Hold my beer, The Outsiders and The Lost Boys." The beloved musical is returning to NYC in an Off Broadway production directed by Tony winner Danya Taymore.

Producers announced this week that Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater’s Tony-winning musical will mark its 20th anniversary at Studio Seaview. The production will include choreography from Celia Rowlson-Hall (The Testament of Ann Lee) and music supervision by Or Matias (The Great Comet). Dates are still TBA. As for the cast, open casting calls are scheduled for July 10–11 (details to come via the show's social media accounts), which means theater kids across the tristate area are currently warming up their most emotionally devastating renditions of “Mama Who Bore Me.” 

When it arrived in 2006, the show transformed a 19th-century German play into a hormone-soaked rock musical that launched the careers of stars including Jonathan Groff, Lea Michele, John Gallagher, Jr., Lilli Cooper, Gideon Glick and Skylar Astin. After winning eight Tony Awards, it went on to inspire approximately 20 years of drama students to stare wistfully into the middle distance while clutching a handheld mic. 

According to the producers, this new staging aims to return the musical to the “raw force and urgency” of Frank Wedekind’s original play. Its themes—teenage isolation, sexual repression and adults who refuse to listen—have only become more resonant in the last 20 years, but the challenge for Taymor will be making a musical that once felt dangerous and disruptive feel that way again.

Premiering in 2006 Off Broadway at Atlantic Theater Company before coming to Broadway that year, the musical returned to Broadway in 2015 in a production from California's Deaf West Theatre.

Additional casting and creative-team announcements are expected in the coming months. Until then, expect social media to be flooded with grainy clips of people insisting that the original cast recording changed their lives. To be fair, most of them will be correct.