Spring Awakening: A Musical
by Duncan Sheik, Steven Sater

"Beautiful, messy, exhilarating, awkward, vital […] [Duncan Sheik] manages to deliver lovely, graceful pop melodies that work in a theatrical context — that is, to propel a story and elucidate its characters." - USA Today"This brave new musical, haunting and electrifying by turns, restores the mystery, the thrill and quite a bit of the terror to that shattering transformation that stirs in all our souls sometime around the age of 13, well before most of us have the intellectual apparatus in place to analyze its impact. […] Mr. Sater, who wrote the book and lyrics, remains faithful to the play’s awareness that the discovery of sex can carry in its heady wake both salvation and destruction, particularly when it is coupled with ignorance. Mr. Sheik’s music, spare in its simple orchestrations, lush in the lapping reach of its seductive choruses, embodies the shadowy air of longing that infuses the show, the excitement shading into fear, the joy that comes with a chaser of despair."

— The Ne