Word: springly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1980
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...theatre, so is Wedekind, as Brecht's mentor, a star ascendant in the night sky. This is Wedekind year at the Loeb; the American Rep is scheduled to perform Lulu early next year, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Drama Club started its season last week with an auspicious production of Spring's Awakening, Wedekind's first work...
...Spring's Awakening, which Wedekind subtitled "A Tragedy of Childhood," concerns the sexual awakening of adolescence, "the first stirrings of manhood," the unleashing of the dogs of sex. The protagonists--Melchior, Moritz, Wendla, and Ilse--feel these stirrings, and are confused by them, and find no direction from a daft and hypocritical matriarchy. Left to fend for themselves in the erotic floodtide, some swim, others drown. This, for Wedekind, is the central point; the sexual impulse is merely a force, and as a force has no moral content; it should be recognized as such, and neither hidden nor judged...
Director David Prum has brought Spring's Awakening into the American present, to fine effect. Between scenes we hear Ian Dury or the Rolling Stones, and on the screen at the back of the stage we see ads for Jordache jeans, or a picture of the Hollywood Bowl, or the murder scene from Psycho. The screen is also used for video projection--Prum has a television camera trained on one or more of the actors much of the time, and pretty soon you can see why those tribesmen you hear about hate to have their photographs taken, for fear that...
...American city. All of the natural traumas of puberty and the dawning of self-consciousness are accelerated by our popular culture, by naked bodies in tight jeans, and cinematic violence, and television, television, television, impinging on us at all times of the day. Prum has made of Spring's Awakening an indictment of what might be called the California culture, in which grotesqueries are made of both the young, who are made to feel the weight of the world before they feel a shaving razor, and of the mature, who act like idiots, with no sense that they should...
...LEVELS, the production loses steam after intermission. To be sure, this is in part Wedekind's fault; Spring's Awakening starts to flail away in the end, as if the author is in a hurry to get to his striking climax. Still, this only calls for a greater focus on the director's part. Instead, Prum flails even more than Wedekind. Scenes take on the flavor of sketches from Saturday Night Live; the light, controlled parody that distinguished the first half lumbers now in its obviousness. Worse, it gets turned back on the play and the production itself, always...