It's about to be a Spring Awakening winter

The new, young cast and the creative team of Spring Awakening emphasized one element above all else in our conversations with them on Wednesday night. “There’s a lot of play in this show,” Ashlyn Maddox, who plays Wendla, tells us. Amalia Yoo, who plays Ilse, helpfully clarified that by “play,” they mean “childhood imagination, childhood fantasy.” Early promo materials have featured the cast hanging out in the woods, a visual nod to the universality of childhood wonder. “I think there’s something in play that brings about newness and a difference of perspective,” said Tyler Jordan Wesley, who plays Melchior. “It’s the tool that we’re using to really make this material fresh.” At least on Wednesday night, that “play” manifested in another way: Wesley performed “All That’s Known” for the room, with Ryo Kamibayashi, who portrays Moritz, accompanying him on piano.

The cast is currently in their second week of rehearsals, and they’ve already found other ways to make the material fresh. Earlier this week, they read the original 1891 Frank Wedekind play, but with a twist: Instead of reading their own parts, they drew parts from a hat. “Being able to just listen to the words, from somebody else’s perspective, was really cool,” Wesley told us. Yoo’s role was played by Kamibayashi. “It was really emotional to hear him read Ilse recount the trauma that she’s experienced. It gave a lot of context,” she shares, also acknowledging that the original play kind of bummed them all out. But, it was also clarifying. “In the play, Ilse really fights back,” she says. “Every single one of these characters is a fighter. They’re really, really fighting for something: To be good, in a world that’s just punching them down.” 

The cast already seems to have a good rapport with each other. Kamibayashi joked, “I was quite dropped in as Ilse, and I think Amalia was a little threatened by that.” But there was a facet of the exercise that gave him serious pause. In the musical, all the adult parts are played by two actors, just called “adult men” and “adult women.” Lilli Cooper, who played Martha in the original 2006 production, returns to play the adult women in this revival, and, when it came time to draw names for the reading, drew Martha. “We were like, oh, there’s something special going on here,” Kamibayashi recalled. “I had a scene with me as Ilse and her as Martha, and it was just the most surreal moment of, wow, I get to have a scene with Lilli Cooper as her original character in the original play.” 

Part of the beauty of the process is that, although the cast is Gen Z, the artists working behind the scenes span generations, and they’re working together on a story that’s more or less the same as it was in 2006 or 1891. “I think that this story has lasted because it continues to be true, because we, for whatever reason, as a society, can’t seem to figure out the same lessons and these cycles continue,” Taymor tells us. “If we just keep pouring love into the production, hopefully magic will happen.”