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Facebook met Broadway in ‘Spring Awakening’ Part 2
For Part 1 of Facebook met Broadway in ‘Spring Awakening,’ scroll down, or link here.
(Not to give anything away, but, due to a lack of sex education and adult transparency, the teen characters must process masturbation, abortion, rape, child abuse and suicide on their own. That was one reason Frank Wedekind’s original play was not produced for 15 years, before it was staged by directing legend Max Reinhardt.)
After winning the role, Mientus remained with the touring cast a full “season,” taking multiweek summer break when many such shows go on hiatus. He now returns to the road with some replacement actors, landing at Bass Concert Hall Oct 20-25.
Meanwhile, Mientus, the actor, has attracted a personal following online and, after a year, has become a practiced interview subject. (Google him for more results.)
Though his teen years are well behind him, Mientus recalls the emotional drama.
“I can certainly tap into that age and mind-set,” he says. “The stakes are so high. Getting a grade in an arbitrary class - calculus, say, when you are trying to become an actor - back then it was so life and death.”
Even the arrival of new company members to the touring “Spring Awakening” brings back pained memories from high school.
“It’s the first day of school all over again,” he says. “You thought, ‘Who was in your lunch period and who wasn’t.’ I mean, why couldn’t I just eat lunch by myself? But for a 15-year-old, that’s ‘Hamlet.’ “
Apparently, he’s not the only one affected by the vivid memories of confused teen years. The musical of “Spring Awakening” hit the public consciousness just as the value of abstinence-only sex education was being vigorously discussed, and not just in Texas.
“The show is about what happens when teens don’t have information and support,” Mientus says. “When they are trying to figure it out on their own. In the show, you see that sex is human. People are born with it. They have it all their lives. Ignore it or call it taboo, something that you put away, or silence, that doesn’t work.”
The musical adaptors retained almost all the material from Wedekind’s original play, and yet, to Mientus, it’s as timely as the morning’s headlines.
“It was a problem then; it’s a problem now,” he says. “The play has been trying to say something for more than 100 years: ‘We have these feelings. We are not wrong. We are not sick. We should not be made to feel that way.’ ”
More to come …
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