Review: Musical 'Awakens' Beck Center Stage

Teenagers are awkward.

Especially when they’re sexually repressed, late 19th century German teenagers.

In its opening night at the Friday, “,” behind an entrancing cast, captured the exact essence of how awkward and frustrating teen-dom can be with just the right amount of sexual tension – truck loads of it.

With song titles including My Junk, Touch Me and The Word of Your Body, the Beck Center’s co-production with Baldwin-Wallace College’s Music Theater program proved exactly why the New York Times said this play would “change Broadway forever.”

The cast danced around subject matters as weighty as suicide, depression, child abuse and homosexuality in a down-to-earth manner that seemed more befitting of a hip, independent theater company than Broadway. The strong language, sexual references and brief nudity were certainly punchy, but never seemed gratuitous.

Kyra Kennedy and Zach Adkins were charming and impressive in the lead roles, but the most powerful performance was turned in by James Penca, who played the emotionally fraught Moritz with a poignancy often reserved for actors twice the college student's age.

At times, the cast portrays the pent-up sexual energy that comes with being a teenager so well you’d expect them, at any minute, to unwind in a whirlwind, not dissimilar to the Tasmanian Devil.

What struck so well with the performance was that it, even though it is unwaveringly sad – I may or may not have had to fight back tears – it maintains a beautiful rawness during its heaviest moments, particularly Penca’s performance of “I Don’t Do Sadness.”

Overall, I went into the Beck Center expecting to like “Spring Awakening,” after hearing so many positive things about it.

I just didn’t expect that I wouldn’t want to leave.

The show runs through March 4.