Istvan Dugalin ➤

Olivia Neary-Hatton & Jake Bunyan in Spring Awakening | Photo by Dahlia Katz

Penned by Frank Wedekind, this century-old tale of adolescent sexual discovery from within the crushing strictures of a repressive society was controversial in its time, but has since been embraced as a classic. (Like everything else now, it’s even a musical!) As I’m not properly familiar with the original play, I can’t be sure exactly how Paola Santalucia’s adaptation of Spring Awakening for Soulpepper differs, though I have a vague sense.

I appreciate the lyrical intensity of Santalucia’s writing and direction. He and his design team have crafted an aesthetic that suggests the 19th century Germanic setting while also embracing a stylized, self-aware theatrical artifice that is fanciful and contemporary. I was fully on-board with all of the creative decisions here and can’t fault any of them for a vibe that just, well, became increasingly unpersuasive—and, eventually, quite alienating—as the three-act production dragged on. And my detachment really was consistently gradual. The first third had me pretty much spellbound for its duration.

The story pulls us into the sexual awakening of a handful of young men and women as parents and school authority figures try to curtail their burgeoning awareness. This prime objective, to enforce an austere conformity, varies in shape, from affectionate coaxing to violent bludgeoning, and ultimately succeeds only in warping their young psyches as they try to reconcile visceral truth with social expectation. This is a world where boys are whipped if their grammar is wrong and girls are told dresses must cover their ankles and babies are delivered by a stork—grotesquely absurd facades laid over primal urges.

There are over a dozen characters we track throughout, but the core drama is propelled by a well-developed handful.

Melchior Gabor (Jake Bunyan) is an atheistic rebel who takes the academically and socially struggling Moritz Stiefel (Jake Cohen) under his wing; spurring on his erotic imagination. Early on, he gifts him a handwritten text on human sexuality—an item that will figure significantly into the plot and Melchior’s fate as a scapegoat when Moritz succumbs to his anxiety and ostracism.

There is so much humour and yearning in their dynamic. Bunyan’s playful cajoling and Cohen’s jittery, heart-wrenchingly neurotic awkwardness—it is one of my favourite dynamics in the play. Though we get a moment of overt homosexual expression in a sweet and humorous third act scene between Noah Beemer’s Hansy Rillow and Justin Eddy’s Ernst Röbel (featuring some very suggestive business with apples), there is a thrilling urgency in the muted, amorphous sexuality of the brief yet pointed moments of physical contact between Melchior and Moritz. Cohen’s portrait of distress reaches an astonishing fever pitch in his hilarious and harrowing monologue that concludes the second act.

The first act ends with my favourite scene in the entire production: a seemingly innocent pastoral interaction between Bunyan’s Melchior and Olivia Neary-Hatton’s Wendla Bergman. She’s collecting flowers in her pretty summer dress and he’s reading under a tree, but as the scene progresses, their lust rises to the surface and finally resolves itself in a disconcerting bit of consensual, desperately coaxed, violence—Wendla all but begging Melchior to whip her with a tree branch. The episode is beautifully rendered in all its darkness and whimsical honesty.

There are many such vital and vivid moments throughout, examined in dialogue and evocative mise en scène. One of Santalucia’s most stirring motifs has the youths’ inner wildness erupt in scene transitions where they scream and scamper across the stage in a chaotic flurry. These interstitial sequences represent an imagined extreme of freedom, a reckless abandonment of all the conventions inflicted upon these adolescents.

Justin Eddy, Jake Cohen, EJ Candelario, Mackenzie Wojcik, Jake Bunyan & Eric Miracle in Spring Awakening | Photo by Dahlia Katz

Shannon Lea Doyle’s set echoes this dichotomy by contrasting the earthy textures of a tree, grass and rising mound with grey, modular fragments of wall (which eventually come together to form an oppressive expanse). A crucifix is a pivotal image—relatively small, but uniting the whole in its symbolic demand for religious attention. Doyle makes great use of the brickwork at the back of the Baillie Theatre, as does lighting designer Kevin Lamotte, who has a series of footlights cast massive shadows of the performers onto this backdrop, giving the intimate drama a sort of mythic significance.

You can sense, on the periphery of the text’s juxtaposition of religious dogma and earthy sensuality, the potential for these to be reconciled, but the story’s thematic structure relies upon their fraught, conflicting interplay. Especially redolent are the way these kids find erotic purpose in nature. The experience and articulation of such phenomena as lying in grass that has been warmed by the sun are somehow even more viscerally expressive than staged depictions of masturbation or lovemaking.

So far, this all sounds as if I fully enjoyed the production, and so much of the early moments I did find extremely compelling. By the third act though, when things get quite dire—with pregnancy, judgement, and suicide having wrought misery—the established intensity flattened out, for me, into strained melodrama.

I found it particularly difficult to invest in the adult characters. Each of the players (Daren A. Herbert, Liisa Repo-Martell, Diego Matamoros and Raquel Duffy) have, many times, swept me off my feet. None of them have much gravitas here and, especially when called upon to be threatening, fall into a muted pantomime of authority. I was especially disappointed by Herbert—an actor who rather consistently reduces me to tears—in his portrayal of a cruel headmaster who comes off more goofy here than menacing.

Ugh… I’m sorry, I really am. I wanted so much to love this and I came so close. There are moments of genuine power that truly rattled me. In essence, it all suits my sensibilities perfectly; in execution, however, I lost my grip on the highly expressionistic forms as their authenticity faltered, then deteriorated. On paper, the finale is deeply touching; embodied here, it is uncomfortably stilted.

Spring Awakening
September 10 to October 11, 2026
Young Centre for the Performing Arts, Baillie Theatre
(50 Tank House Lane)
2 hours, 30 minutes (including 2 intermissions)

Anaka Maharaj-Sandhu & Jake Cohen in Spring Awakening | Photo by Dahlia Katz