A 21st-century teenage rock musical set within Frank Wedekind’s sexually repressed 19th-century Germany is one of the crazier ideas on Broadway.
Two years and a hatful of awards later, this stunning show arrives at the perfect venue — a Victorian theatre encased within a modern building. There is no better place for a musical in which Victorian adolescents whip out radio microphones and let rip their teenage angst like modern pop stars.
Wedekind’s anger about a world in which the young are kept in ignorance of their bodies is harnessed to a tender and thrilling rock score by Duncan Sheik (music) and Steven Slater (lyrics and book). Sian Thomas and Richard Cordrey are terrific as the teachers and parents who keep their charges in sexual ignorance and misery. And with one show American director Michael Mayer has discovered more British talent than all the BBC casting shows put together — only without lining the pockets of West End producers with licence fee-payers’ money. There are performances here brimful of yearning, and the central love story between Charlotte Wakefield’s Wendla and Aneurin Barnard’s Melchior makes Romeo and Juliet look like Janet and John.
