Spring Awakening Puts Teen Angst to a Driving Rock Beat and Lets It Go Buck Wild.

Comments (0) By Elaine Liner Thursday, Apr 1 2010

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Leapin’ lieder! The cast of the Broadway tour of Spring Awakening takes flight with Bill T. Jones’ soaring, stomping choreography.

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Spring Awakening continues through April 4 at the Winspear Opera House, AT&T Performing Arts Center. 214-880-0202.

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Melchior and Wendla are the central love story (they'll remind you of My So-Called Life's Angela and her crush object, Jordan Catalano). But all the young characters get a song to share individual troubles. Melchior's friend Moritz, played by Taylor Trensch, fears he'll fail to graduate and plans to run away to America to escape his father's wrath. His anthem of defiance is the poignant, pulsating "Don't Do Sadness." He's also sexually frustrated; the hornier he gets, the higher and stiffer his hair. Martha (Sarah Hunt) and Ilse (Steffi D, a 2006 Canadian Idol finalist) sing "The Dark I Know Well," about sexual abuse at home. They all join in on "The Word of Your Body," as haunting a love song as West Side Story's "One Hand, One Heart."

There are moments in Spring Awakening that will take you right to 15 or 16, when you wanted to stomp your heels through the floor to be heard or to sing your pain away because you couldn't express it in words. That's part of the magic of this show. It turns up the volume on the lessons of young heartache and drowns out the noise of adulthood's blah blah blah.