Tony-winning musical "Spring Awakening" comes to the Paramount

a fresh phenomenon, a pop-rock musical of surprise mass appeal that swept the 2007 Tony Awards, brought legions of teens to Broadway and yielded a Grammy-winning album.

Or you can see "Spring Awakening" another way — as one of those rare musical romances that channels the angst and imagination of a generation.

Both descriptions of the Broadway hit, which comes to the Paramount Theatre Tuesday on its first national tour, would be apt.

As "Rent" did for many coming of age in the early 1990s, and musicals such as "West Side Story," "Carousel" and grand operas like "La Bohème" did in earlier eras, "Spring Awakening" harnesses the power of young ardor, and the poignancy of young death.

What is new here is how the show has transformed Frank Wedekind's caustic 1891 play "Spring Awakening" into a work of great sincerity with an edgy rock beat, explosive dancing, and a frank, timely exploration of teen pregnancy, suicide and abortion.

"It is a very earnest show," says noted singer-composer Duncan Sheik, who spent seven years forging "Spring Awakening" with playwright and lyricist Steven Sater.

"One thing I feel is problematic about so many new musicals is that they are parodies of themselves," Sheik continues. "I understand why 'Avenue Q' is a good show, but it's so self-aware, so ironic. I didn't want to do that at all. I wanted to really move people's hearts."

His cohort Sater adds he wanted the show to express the "anguish and yearning of adolescence, this bursting open of emotion. I still think when people go to the theater they want passion, a hero's journey."

Both men are Broadway neophytes. And Sheik admits candidly that he knew or cared little about Broadway tuners before composing "Spring Awakening."

The singer-songwriter, famed for his hit 1997 single "Barely Breathing," met Sater in New York in the late '90s through their mutual practice of Buddhism.

"We began writing songs together, and Steven told me he'd been a fan of this play 'Spring Awakening' since he was a teenager," recalls Sheik. "He suggested we do a musical based on it, but I was extremely reticent. I didn't think that was in my wheelhouse."

Sater came up with the idea in 1999, he says, "as a millennial way of looking backward to look forward."

The shooting spree by teen gunmen at Columbine High School that same year also inspired Sater. "It gave me a great sense of urgency, a need to reach out and touch the hearts of young people."

At first glance, Wedekind's spiky German Expressionist drama seems an odd vehicle for that purpose. A stinging critique of a society rife with sexual hypocrisy, Sater calls it "a little black comic masterpiece."

A story about young passion

The play considers the misfit student, Melchior, and the pretty young girl Wendla, who are besieged by their surging adolescent hormones.

The teachers and parents in their repressive German town refuse to educate them, or their peers, including Melchior's anguished friend Moritz, about puberty, sex and procreation. And after Melchior essentially rapes Wendla, she dies in a botched abortion arranged by her mother. Teen suicide and homosexuality also factor into the plot.

"Spring Awakening" was written in the same period that Dr. Sigmund Freud was developing theories about sex and the psyche. But the play was so offensive to Victorian sensibilities it was not staged until 1906.

New York City officials decried the first U.S. production, in 1917, as pornographic. Though the play went on, it closed after a single night.

Political activist Emma Goldman attended that sole performance. In a glowing review she deemed the work "a powerful indictment hurled against society," a society that "out of sheer hypocrisy and cowardice" fails to educate children about sex and basic biology.

Wedekind's script has since been staged in many English-language versions. The multilingual Sater made his own translation from the German for the musical. He preserved the original, 1800s German setting, but instilled more romance and made the ending more hopeful.

"The original is far more brutal and dark. I wanted to tell a story that would resonate today. We brought in a 'Romeo and Juliet' aspect. And in the end people rise from the grave to urge their peers to live on."

The power of song

To compose the show, Sheik familiarized himself with the Broadway musical genre, "recent and classic. I learned a lot about the form, and what I loved was the idea that when you couple songs with a great story, they deepen each other so much. That excited me."

Rapturous music, one can argue, is what makes the shows Sheik studied — "Porgy and Bess," "Carousel," "West Side Story" — soar above our cynical radar, and connects us with the power of liebestod (an aria of love and death).

Characters pouring out their feelings in song allows for a grandeur of emotion that spoken dialogue (Shakespeare's excepted) rarely conveys. And Sheik's tempestuous, at times jarring "Spring Awakening" score uses rock and neo-folk modes currently popular with young listeners.

Songs are performed by an onstage band and actors holding mics. Another bold anachronistic touch? Sater's lyrics, which articulate what youths 100 years ago may have felt but could not express — about their frustrations ("The Bitch of Living"), confusions ("Mama Who Bore Me") and sexual longings ("Touch Me").

In 2006, after years of revisions, readings and workshops, "Spring Awakening" premiered at Off Broadway's Atlantic Theatre in a blistering staging by director Michael Mayer, choreographed by Bill T. Jones. Enacted mainly by gifted unknowns in their early 20s, the show was an immediate smash. It moved to Broadway, where it has logged more than 1,000 performances.

Along with eight Tonys and other major prizes, the show has garnered near-unanimous critical praise. Variety's David Rooney lauded it for capturing "the dangerous anxiety of youth standing on the precipice of adulthood with transfixing honesty."

But it was word-of-mouth buzz from young fans — along with "Spring Awakening" pages on Facebook and MySpace — that stoked the show's huge popularity among teens.

There are reports of young fans making five or more repeat visits — sometimes with parents in tow.

Sater, the father of two adolescents, says he's unaware of any parental complaints about the show's graphic language, or the sexually charged story.

"I'm sure a lot of people say, 'It's about teenagers and sex? No thank you, I'll pass.' But what young people constantly tell me is how much it has affected their lives, touched their hearts, given them courage to go on. And adults find it moving too. We've all known that feeling of a first, pure love."

Setting a higher standard

Productions of "Spring Awakening" are in the works in London and other foreign cities. Stateside, it's been referenced in the public discussion over the pregnancy of Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's unwed teenage daughter.

Sheik's view? "We live in a schizophrenic world with regard to sexual morality. Turn on MTV at 4:45 in the afternoon, and there's lots of overt sexual innuendo and T&A.

"But another part of the culture is very Puritanical, all about abstinence, and sex before marriage is a sin. It's like we've come full circle."

We've also come full-circle with the Broadway romantic musical, in a sense. Just as Jonathan Larson's "Rent" crashed through a Broadway dominated by British blockbusters to give gritty voice to young love and death in the shadow of AIDS, "Spring Awakening" has broken away from the cartoon and jukebox Broadway trends. It has become a touchstone for youth in a period of social polarization.

Sater and Sheik are working on new musicals based on the life of the emperor Nero and Hans Christian Andersen's "The Nightingale." Sater hopes the success of "Spring Awakening" has raised the stakes for new youth musicals. "As a culture, I sometimes think we've kind of given up on young people," he says. "We say they're post-literate, and not interested in anything but computer games.

"But then you see droves of kids come to our show, based on a classic play and told in formal language, and embrace it as their own. You see how capable they are of responding to literature — to stories of uplift, and of darkness, too."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com