Spring Awakening

Spring Awakening is a rock musical set in a provincial German town in 1891, where adults keep teenagers in the dark about sex and their own bodies. The young people try to work it out for themselves, and the story follows what that costs them. Its source is Frank Wedekind's 1891 play Spring Awakening; Steven Sater wrote the book and lyrics, and Duncan Sheik the music.

This production is a new staging of the 2006 musical, produced by Seaview as a limited engagement at its own Off-Broadway house, Studio Seaview. Danya Taymor directs. Previews are set to begin on November 27, 2026, with opening night on December 17, 2026. Eight Tony Awards went to the original Broadway production in 2007, Best Musical among them.

Melchior is a sharp schoolboy with radical ideas, who has read his way to knowledge the adults withhold. Wendla is curious, but her mother will not explain where babies come from. Moritz, Melchior's anxious best friend, is terrified of failing at school. In the first act Melchior shares what he knows with Moritz in writing, and he and Wendla are drawn together.

Other teenagers carry heavier burdens. Martha is being abused by her father, and Ilse, thrown out by her parents, lives at an artists' colony. The second act shows what silence and punishment do to these young people once the adults discover how much they have learned. How it ends is covered in the last section.

Sheik's score is contemporary rock set against a 19th-century story, so the songs sound like the audience's era rather than the characters'. The original Broadway band had seven players: strings and guitars, keyboard and percussion. The song list for this revival has not been published, and the score has shifted between productions: the Off-Broadway premiere and the 2021 London revival began the second act with a different number than the Broadway original did.

Sheik won two Tonys in 2007: Best Original Score, shared with Sater, and Best Orchestrations. He died on September 17, 2026, at age 56, about ten weeks before this revival's first preview.

Two actors play every adult, a long-standing convention of this musical. As of October 2026, George Abud plays The Adult Men and Lilli Cooper plays The Adult Women. Cooper was Martha in the original Broadway cast, her Broadway debut at age 16.

As of October 2026, eleven young performers play the teenagers, among them Tyler Jordan Wesley as Melchior, Ashlyn Maddox as Wendla and Ryo Kamibayashi as Moritz. Two of the company, Jack Bateman and Antonio Porciello, were cast from a July 2026 open call that drew 2,532 performers.

Wedekind wrote the play in 1890 and 1891, and it reached a stage in Berlin on November 20, 1906. The musical took about eight years of rewrites, concerts and workshops before its first performance. Atlantic Theater Company hosted that Off-Broadway premiere, which began on May 19, 2006. Opening night of the Broadway production, directed by Michael Mayer, was December 10, 2006, at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre; it ended on January 18, 2009, having played 859 performances plus 29 previews. A Deaf West Theatre revival in English and American Sign Language followed on Broadway in 2015.