Timeless Shock of a Play Exuberantly Performed by Salve University Theater Department

The Salve production of Spring Awakening is currently running at the Casino Theater in Newport through April 17, and you should make the time to go see it.

You know a piece of art deals beautifully with the taboos of human experience when it has been banned and censored more frequently than it’s been able to play, and it’s still playing. Spring Awakening defines timelessness as it continues to be as urgent, poignant and relevant in 2016 as it was when it was written in the early 1890s. The musical adaptation of Frank Wedekin’s play was created by Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik in 2006 and, although it dates itself through its musical style, still packs a punch as it explores the distinct but blurry border that separates childhood and adulthood: sexual awareness.

Where do babies come from? The inability of one parent to explain the birds and the bees to a young girl named Wendla is at the core of this story. What types of actions do we promote by letting shame and fear steer how we communicate with young people?  Spring Awakening­ is set in a small town in 1800s Germany. Melchoir, a philosophical and intelligent young man, stands out in a class of boys in various stages of pubescent growth. He is a Renaissance man with a great capacity for independent thought and an interest in science and (as we find out) anatomy! Melchoir’s best friend Moritz is twitchy, aching and shell-shocked at the sudden amplification of his senses. The play focuses on the inner worlds of the boys, their building sexual fantasies and the confusion that arises from the randomness of their objects of desire (ranging from busty piano teachers, nubile bohemian girls, blue stockings, a parent and other men). On the other side of town the girls swoon over their own blooming. Wendla and Melchoir, clueless and completely knowledgeable respectively, are overcome by the “word of their bodies” and have to deal with the consequences. Moritz succumbs to a fate even graver.

The production of Spring Awakening at the Casino Theater is appropriately performed by students at Salve University; they lend the unified distaste for authority, the animosity felt toward a repressed, conformist social environment the real energy of youth. For main-man Hunter Nicolson (Melchoir) the play is an appropriate send-off into adulthood (he is a senior graduating this year). Nicolson plays the role convincingly; a natural high-water besserwisser. Melchoir is the kind of kid who will inform the future thought of his culture if allowed, and you need a youthfully optimistic actor with charisma and a hint of geekiness to pull it off. Nicholson does. Mariana Bracciale (Wendla) belts out her woes, questions and discoveries with exuberance and naiveté. She remains convincingly, and sweetly, clueless until the very end. Nathaniel Flachs (Moritz) is hilarious and easy to empathize with. He somehow makes a Billie Joe Armstrong in the 1800s real; we will always have the angst youth, the jock humbled by the task of controlling himself. Flachs’ crazy eyes will haunt you: all we had to do was speak to man!

The entire student cast enthusiastically execute this piece dedicated to their generation. Venditelli (Hanschen) and Benell (Ernst) were brave in their performances, Alexandra D’Agostino plays all adult female roles so convincingly we thought she was one of the two adult actors in the play (well done). Memorize the name Racquel Jean-Louis (Ilse). This is her fifth play and in her performance of Blue Wind one senses the potential for a long and successful career in music theater. Reggie Phoenix’s direction makes for a dynamic stage, and the musical accompaniment is enjoyable despite its role dating a timeless story; the risk all musical theater adaptations run. Thank goodness for those amazing outfits: They keep us safely grounded in the 1800s.

This is the type of story that is hard to see intergenerationally. In other words, you go with your friends and let your parents see it on another night. This story was banned, censored and prohibited in its previous forms for the same reasons watching it with your parents will be awkward. That said, society would be a better place if a mandatory viewing of Spring Awakening was in that parenting handbook we’ve all been dreaming about.