Brilliantly innovative direction, stunningly original choreography, a baker’s dozen revelatory performances, and a Broadway-caliber production design guarantee Southland audiences as outstanding a Spring Awakening as any musical theater lover could ever hope to see.

The Duncan Sheik-Steven Sater adaptation of German playwright Frank Wedekind’s 1906 drama Frühlings Erwachen broke new musical theater ground off-and-on Broadway two decades ago by tackling such edgy topics as child abuse, S&M, incest, abortion, and suicide among teenagers just now awakening to their sexuality.

Sater’s streamlining of Wedekind’s melodramatic storylines, singer-songwriter-pop star Sheik’s catchy alternative rock score, and Bill T. Jones’ choreography all combined to make Spring Awakening an 859-performance hit.

The intervening years have seen hundreds if not thousands of locally produced takes on the Broadway original, but the story they have to tell remains the same one that first captivated New York audiences back in 2006.

Spring Awakening begins quietly, with innocent but sexually inquisitive girl-next-door Wendla (Kayley Stallings) wondering if she’ll ever be told the truth about man-woman relations in “Mama Who Bore Me.”

Before long, however, the song has taken on a girl-band rock beat echoed by the boys when handsome, popular, self-confident Melchior (Corydon Malgoza),  introverted, inhibited, wet-dream-plagued Moritz (Brody Tarrant Sitton), and their fellow Latin class students suddenly erupt into the testosterone-fueled chords of “The Bitch Of Living” and later in a full-cast showstopper (“Totally Fucked”) that reveals the teens’ raging desires, their unfulfilled sexual wants, and their dissatisfaction with the world around them.

 Without these musical numbers and The Pink Floyd-esque “Touch Me,” the anthem-like “I Believe,” and the heartbreaking “Left Behind,” Spring Awakening would simply be an abbreviated version of a dated German play.

With them, it becomes something both extraordinary and contemporary, as if 21st-century souls were inhabiting these long-deceased youths.

It’s taken nearly twenty years for Spring Awakening to make it from NYC to the OC’s Chance, but as was the case with the theater’s sensational Rent a couple summers’ back, audiences can expect to have their minds blown and their hearts broken whether experiencing Spring Awakening for the first time, or in my own case, as the eighteenth of a dozen and a half different incarnations.

Director Jocelyn A. Brown signals from the get-go that the things she’ll be doing will make even diehard Spring Awakening aficionados gasp at her innovative brilliance, as when we witness physical evidence of precisely why Wendla runs to Mama to ask what’s happening to her body and her desires as she matures into young womanhood.

Equally ground-breaking is having half of the cast of thirteen join music director Robyn Manion’s four-piece orchestra at one time or another during the production on both string and wind instruments.

Brown allows us to see exactly who (plural) Hanschen is fantasizing about when he pleasures himself to orgasm. She has a pivotal character stay physically present as friends leave flowers on the just-deceased’s grave, and she pays tribute to Act Three of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in a particularly powerful climactic scene set in a local cemetery.

Mo Goodfellow’s choreography too feels equally fresh and new with nary a trace of the stomps and back kicks and leaps and jumps that characterized the Broadway original.

Instead, Goodfellow focuses on telling these characters’ stories and revealing their raw emotions through hand, arm, and upper-torso moves performed in razor-sharp sync, to name just one element of her choreography that sets it apart from Tony winner Jones’s on Broadway.

And just wait till you see how designers Bradley Kaye (sets), Bradley Allen Lock (costumes), Jacqueline Malenke (lighting), and Sergio Emilio (hair and makeup) have combined their prodigious talents to create a production design that tops the Broadway original in virtually every way.

A supremely multitalented cast more than do justice to roles they’ve made very much their own, from Malgoza, who brings power and sensitivity to Melchior while looking like he just walked out of a teen girl’s anime prince fantasy, to Stalling’s exquisitely rendered Wendla, as delicate as she is determined to explore her budding sexuality, to Sitton, breaking Moritz stereotypes in a performance that will break your heart again and again.

Jack Thomas Aitken (Georg) and Jaylen Baham (Otto) reveal heavenly pipes throughout the show, while Caiden Falstrup-Finney as the sexually fluid Hanschen and Diego Huerta-Gutierrez as the hopelessly-smitten-with-Hanschen Ernst share the sweetest and most adorable of budding-love scenes.

Not only do Isabella Kaplan as teen outcast Ilse and Emma Magbanua as “Daddy’s girl” Martha reveal scarred hearts and powerful pipes in “The Dark I Know Well,” they join Manion’s keyboards, Curtis Humphreys’s guitars, and Jorge Zuniga’s drums from time to time, Kaplan on guitar and Magbanua on flute and bass, as do fellow female classmates (Linda Bard’s Thea on cello and Naya Ramsey-Clarke’s Anna on guitar, both terrific) again and again.

Last but not least, the fabulous James Michael McHale and Erica Farnsworth deliver one distinctive cameo after another as various parents, teachers and assorted grownups woefully ill-prepared to give Spring Awakening’s troubled teens the adult guidance they so badly need.

Lia Weed’s expert sound design (Jordyn Nieblas-Galvan is sound engineer) completes the production design mix. Shinshin Yuder Tsai is intimacy coordinator. Martin Noyes is fight director. Sophie Hall Cripe is dramaturg. Nicole Schlitt is stage manager and Alyssa Kammerer is assistant stage manager. Casting is by Lindsay Brooks.

There was a while in the early-to-mid-2010s that Spring Awakening was everywhere, from major regional stagings to 99-seat and college and community theater productions.

Such has not been the case for the past ten years or so, giving event status to Chance Theater’s 2025 revival. That you probably won’t see a better Spring Awakening in your lifetime gives SoCal audiences even more reason to cheer.

Chance Theater, 5522 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim Hills.
www.chancetheater.com

–Steven Stanley
July 19, 2025
Photos: Doug Catiller

Visit www.theatreinla.com/nowplayingrs.php for a review roundup of what’s now playing in theaters around Los Angeles.

Tags: Chance Theater, Duncan ShEIk, Frank Wedekind, Orange County Theater Review, Steven Sater