Leading light: Dan Crawfurd-Porter’s Melchior in Inspired By Theatre’s Spring Awakening. Picture: Mia Scudds
MIKHAIL Lim played Georg in York Stage Musicals’ northern premiere of Spring Awakening at the Vaudeville Theatre, Joseph Rowntree School, York, in November 2010.
Roll forward to May 19 2026 when his startling production of Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater’s rock musical was launched with a 20th Anniversary Preview Event, 20 years to the day since the off-Broadway premiere opened at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York City.
Entry came with a tote bag emblazoned with a lyric from the show. Inside were a notepad and pen (tools for the reviewers, received gratefully) and a Welcome note from Inspired By Theatre, the York company fast establishing a reputation for injecting thrilling new life into landmark musicals.
Spring Awakening director Mikhail Lim, right, in rehearsal with actor-musician JJ Thornton, who plays Hanschen. Picture: Tiggy-Jade
“What you are about to witness is a production that aims to honour the heart and spirit of Spring Awakening whilst bringing fresh and contemporary ideas to the piece through thrust staging, actor-musicianship, expressive movement and an intimate, visceral approach to storytelling,” the statement read, emphasising the desire to highlight the kinetic musical’s continued relevance two decades later.
Your reviewer would argue that Sheik and Sater’s raucous musical take on Frank Wedekind’s late-19th century play has taken on even more resonance in those 20 years. The original play’s controversial themes of rape, abortion, teenage suicide, gay first love and adolescent sexual discovery led to Spring Awakening being judged too scandalous to perform in Wedekind’s lifetime, with no public performances until November 1906.
Rianna Pearce’s Wendla, centre, with Maz Nachif’s Martha, left, and Skye Pickford’s Ilse in Spring Awakening. Picture: Mia Scudds
Wedekind was damning the lack of birds & bees tuition and protection provided both by hand-washing and wringing parents and teachers when faced by their young charges’ burgeoning sexual feelings and search for identity. Now, the world has gone the other way, in the era where social media and the dark web provides a tsunami of information, but teenagers can still feel overwhelmed.
Spring Awakening – such an apt title – is a devastating, dark musical of youthful yearning rubbing up against austere learning in the strict schooldays of 1891 Germany. Part play, part punk concert, it comes suited and booted with strong language (the best song is called Totally ****ed) and scenes of a sexual nature (staged with the involvement of intimacy co-ordinator Lina Glissman, by the way).
In a tale of sex & drudge & shock’n’roll, company founder Dan Crawfurd-Porter swaps directorial duties for the Hamlet-echoing role of piercingly bright, free-thinking, atheist, rebellious student Melchior, sharing centre stage with Rianna Louise’s awakening young flower Wendla and Eryn Grant’s tormented, workaholic, tragic Moritz.
Blow by blow account: JJ Thornton’s Hanschen and guitar-playing actor-musician Oskar Nuttall’s Ernst in Spring Awakening. Picture: Mia Scudds
Spring Awakening is above all a wake-up call to the damage that ignorance imposes on young people in a sexually repressive era, here represented by the multiple stultifying roles of the Adult Woman (Gemma McDonald) and Adult Men (Stefan Michaels). Righteous, religious, blinkered, they rule by book and sometimes by belt.
The combination of Gi Vasey’s thrust set design, placing the audience close up, and musical director Jessica Viner’s band of keys, drum and string players, bolstered by guitar and piano/bass/Cajon-playing actor-musicians, gives even more intensity to the already heightened drama.
Vasey places a bare tree stump at the back, draped in ribbons, complemented by bare branches to either side. In the centre is a sand pit, framed in stones, that serves as school playground and field and transfers to a school room with the aid of chairs. The sand is of the shifting variety, in keeping with sense of seismic change, of matters going beyond balance and control.
Eryn Grant’s Moritz, centre, with JJ Thornton’s Hanschen, left, Oskar Nuttall’s Ernst, Lewis Jordan’s Georg and Kailum Farmery’s Otto. Picture: Mia Scudds
Freya McIntosh’s choreography matches the anger and frustration of the modern yet instantly timeless songs, breaking out of the formal lines and restrictive behaviour of the classroom for free, explosive expression, often with a microphone in the hand (a style of presentation later seen in Six The Musical).
Julie Fisher’s costume designs, with green school uniforms for the boys and a more diverse palette for the girls’ dresses, work well with Daniel Grey’s lighting design, and Will Nicholson’s sound design blends band and actor-musicians with clarity.
Eryn Grant is particularly impressive as the crushed Moritz, while Crawfurd-Porter’s Melchior has an edge to him, contrasting with the innocence of curiosity of Rianna Louise’s Wendla.
Explosion of punk energy in the classroom, observed by Stefan Michaels’ Adult Man and Gemma McDonald’s Adult Woman in Spring Awakening. Picture: Mia Scudds
Skye Pickford’s Ilse, with her stillness of presence, JJ Thornton’s Hanschen and Maz Nachif’s Martha catch the eye too, performing in tandem with Oskar Nuttall’s Ernst, Lewis Jordan’s Georg, Kailum Farmey’s Otto, Ines Campos’s Thea and Greta Piasecka in a schoolroom cast that has uniformity but bags of individuality too.
Drawing so strikingly on German Expressionism and folkloric imagery, Mikhail Lim has delivered a shattering, alarming, agitated, impassioned Spring Awakening, reaffirming Inspired By Theatre as a major player, a welcome upstart, on York’s theatre scene.
Inspired By Theatre presents Spring Awakening, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, tonight and tomorrow, 7.30pm; Saturday, 2.30pm and 7.30pm. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.
Inspired By Theatre marking the 20th anniversary of Spring Awakening’s off-Broadway debut on May 19 2006. Picture: Mia Scudds
