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Thursday, October 15, 2009
Facebook met Broadway in ‘Spring Awakening’ Part 3
For more Facebook met Broadway in ‘Spring Awakening,’ scroll to posts below, or link here for Part 1 and Part 2.
“Today, with the Internet and TV saturated with sex, there’s a steady stream of basic information,” cast member Andy Mientus says. “In terms of the logistics of sexuality, it’s all completely available. But not the complicated issues like the psychology of sex. Parents must still be responsible for helping with that. I grew up in an open and honest household. No topic was too tender. We had open dialogue. I feel lucky that way.”
Mientus is proud that “Spring Awakening” is attracting traditional theatergoers as well as young people usually considered marginal fans of Broadway shows.
“It’s a serious, artful piece,” he says. “Look at it: Not linear or straightforward, although there’s a narrative one can grab onto, and there’s the nontraditional staging. But it’s also about young people and rock music. So it can appeal to a theater audience and a teenage audience.”
It helps that the latent love of Broadway musicals never really went away, as evidenced by the vast pop followings for “High School Musical” and “Glee.”
“For a long time, during its Golden Age, music on Broadway and music on the radio were the same,” Mientus says. “Pop music moved on. And show tunes became a ‘genre.’ They could have been lost to popular culture altogether, like vaudeville. Now they are getting back together again.”
Thinking back just three years, Mientus recalls his first ecstatic experience with “Spring Awakening,” sitting on the first row, buzzed by the music and the timely material.
“It was the show I had been waiting a long time to see,” he says. “It’s authentic. It’s my story.”
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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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Facebook met Broadway in ‘Spring Awakening’ Part 1
For those who missed other editions of my 360 article on ‘Spring Awakening’.
Andy Mientus might be the American theater’s first Facebook hero.
Looking for more information online, he discovered that the show hadn’t yet attracted a Facebook fan group. This, remember, was way back when the now-ubiquitous social-media site was restricted to college and high-school students, before adults amplified - or ruined - it, depending your perspective.
So, independently, Mientus, who grew up in Pittsburgh, created a group page. In December 2006, its readers multiplied by thousands when “Spring Awakening” moved to Broadway, earned delirious reviews and, eventually, a Tony Award for Best Musical. Discovering his online championing, one of the show’s producers asked Mientus if his fan page could become the musical’s official Facebook presence.
What had been to Mientus a personal crusade was now becoming a pop phenomenon.
“Maybe people were just ready for it,” Mientus thought.
On a parallel track, the producers were already pushing the show to young audiences through viral marketing, encouraging super-fans like Mientus to attend regularly, seated with the performers on stage during the action. Like “Rent,” “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and other such shows - not coincidentally Mientus’ favorites - “Spring Awakening” established its downtown street credentials before it cranked out the commercial marketing. The hit eventually spun off “The Guilty Ones,” a volunteer fan group that promotes the musical, cross-platform, everywhere it journeys.
“Every show uses the Internet now,” Mientus says. “But ours was one of the first to attack the opportunities on all fronts.”
More to come …
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