The Toronto Theatre Review: Paolo Santalucia’s vibrant revival sets the rebellious vitality of its young performers against a world shaped by repression, guilt and shame.
by Ross
I thought I knew what I was buying when I excitedly organized tickets for myself and my visiting friend. I was taking him to see Spring Awakening, the musical I had loved with all my heart when I saw the original Broadway production back in 2007, starring the impossibly good Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff, and that love was rekindled a few years later with the riveting Deaf West Theatre revival. Then, after everything was booked and scheduled, and after I had congratulated myself on fitting this around numerous desired film openings at TIFF, I realized, suddenly, that Soulpepper was presenting Frank Wedekind’s original 1891 German tragic play, not the Broadway musical I had carried so fondly in my head and heart. I was deflated. But then the lights went down and Soulpepper Theatre’s Spring Awakening, directed with fierce energy by Artistic Director Paolo Santalucia, opened onto a raw, urgent, visually arresting world filled with young people reaching for desire, connection, and an understanding of themselves. And suddenly I was relieved and fully invested.
Wedekind’s young characters find themselves standing on the threshold of adulthood, asking to be let in through wisdom, respect, and guidance. But the adults around them only offer silence, misinformation, and repression. The adaptation by Santalucia (Crow’s Summer and Smoke) finds plenty of anger in that struggle, and in that anger, the production blossoms, filling the theatre with rebellious energy, sexual confusion, and a hunger for connection. Yet the production is at its strongest when that anger opens a window into the quieter inner lives of these young people. The impressive Jake Bunyan (‘Fargo‘) brings depth and honesty to Melchior Gabor, while Olivia Neary-Hatton’s Wendla Bergman brings an equally compelling emotional openness to the production. But it is Jake Cohen’s portrayal of Moritz Stiefel that truly becomes the heartbreaking centre of the production. Neurotic and deeply moving, this young man’s anxiety becomes increasingly difficult to contain or pacify. And the scenes with Anaka Maharaj-Sandhu (Why Not’s Mahabharata) as Ilse deliver an astonishingly grounded emotional openness and complexity that draw us toward them. Surrounded by a strong, unified ensemble, the emotional truth that is unpacked before us makes the tensions between these young people and the adults controlling their lives feel immediate and consequential.
The design wisely matches the emotional pressure with a visual language that is stark and tense. Shannon Lea Doyle’s set creates an emotionally blank canvas, using rich colours and earth textures that allow the performers and the story to occupy a wide, open environment. It’s a landscape that can suddenly feel claustrophobic when the characters are trapped by the rules surrounding them, yet also feel expansive at the same time, filling us with the sense of possibility, if only knowledge had been given to the play’s young characters. Kevin Lamotte’s lighting brings an atmospheric intensity to those spaces, finding striking images within the production’s simplicity, while Ming Wong’s costumes establish the social structures and expectations pressing down on these young lives. Thomas Ryder Payne’s sound design, with its edgy musicality, gives the production a pulse that feels restless and youthful. Together, they all push the atmosphere toward something emotionally raw, dangerous, and immediate.
Inside the production’s high-stakes anger, the volatility occasionally overwhelms the quieter journeys unfolding underneath, and a few scenes struggle to stay deeply connected when the emotional volume remains at full force for too long. Those stretches occasionally make the characters harder to hear beneath the intensity surrounding them. Still, the young ensemble possesses a remarkable commitment to the emotional world of the play, and the production creates a powerful space around their attempts to understand themselves, each other, and a world that refuses to give them the information they need.
The multigenerational cast makes that collision particularly potent. Soulpepper veterans Raquel Duffy, Daren A. Herbert, Diego Matamoros, and Liisa Repo-Martell give the adult world a rigid authority and deeply ingrained expectations. Duffy and Matamoros are particularly astonishing, embodying two very different forms of that authority. Duffy’s mother tries to approach her son with compassion and an open mind, yet ultimately allows him to be severely disciplined and sent away to a more authoritarian school rather than supporting his intellectual curiosity. Matamoros embodies the extreme disciplinarian at the school, where authoritarian control eventually destroys these two boys. Their approaches could hardly feel further apart, yet the disastrous consequences on these boys’ lives are devastatingly similar.
Against that authority, the younger performers electrify the space with a rebellious vitality and an urgent need to understand themselves, their bodies and their sexuality. The sexual tension of the production comes from watching desire collide with repression, guilt and shame, while these young people are given almost no language with which to understand what their bodies already know. Desire is everywhere, but so are guilt, shame and the terrifying realization that the adults who are supposed to explain the world cannot give these young people the language to understand themselves or their bodies.
I thought I would be reconnecting with a musical I already knew and deeply loved. Instead, I found myself face to face with something equally raw and erotically charged in the play that started it all, and that unexpected shift became the surprise gift of the evening for both me and my friend. Santalucia’s Spring Awakening places young people in a world where desire arrives before understanding, where questions are met with silence, scorn, and even violence, and where the body can know something long before the mind has found the words to explain it. The production can be ferocious, volatile, and occasionally overwhelming, but beneath all that noise is a group of young people reaching toward one another with an almost desperate need to understand what they are feeling. They are discovering desire while being taught to fear it, discovering sexuality while being surrounded by shame, and trying to claim a voice in a world that has given them almost no language for who they are becoming. That collision is where this Spring Awakening finds its electricity, and it is what made me realize that I had not simply revisited something I loved. I had discovered something I had never quite seen before.
