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Image Credit:  Spring Awakening

This weekend I happened to attend a performance from the Broadway Across America’s tour of Spring Awakening, which was incredibly enjoyable.  The show, based on Wedekind’s 1890s play, deals with issues of teenage sexuality, rebellion, depression, and even abortion.  Spring Awakening does a very good job in its staging and design of making the connection between teens of the 1890s with teens of the 2000s.  The costumes on the National Tour in particular help make this connection:  the young Moritz wears shoes that strongly resemble Converse All-Stars along with his knickerbockers, and Georg styles his hair in a fauxhawk.  The set mixes over-aestheticized Victorian pictures of angels with neon lighting, and the lyrics also reflect a contemporary sensibility, with songs like “Totally Fucked” and “The Bitch of Living.”  However, while Spring Awakening has uniquely seized the attention of its largely youthful audience, it seems to be part of a particular phenomenon.

I had an interesting conversation with my friend Amanda after watching Spring Awakening about our mutual love of Fox’s new musical television show Glee, in which it occurred to me that one thing the musical does very well is express teenage angst.  Off the top of my head, some popular musicals set among high schoolers include Bye Bye Birdie, Grease, High School Musical, and Hairspray.  While organic form is a more Coleridgean concept than rhetorical, perhaps there is something about the way in which this genre involves visual rhetoric that is particularly appropriate for the “drama” of teenage life.

Image Credit: Photobucket 

While Glee is about teens, it directs itself towards a slightly different audience than Spring Awakening.  The advertising for the show uses the L hand sign for loser as a part of its logo, which has been a part of teen movie rhetoric as far back as Clueless, if not further.  However, over the summer Fox built up its teen audience by advertising the show over an extended mall tour.  The musical selections however reflect a desire to appeal to a wide audience, with such choices as Bel Biv Devoe’s “Poison,” Kanye West’s “Golddigger,” and “Maybe This Time” from Cabaret.  Glee’s audience is expected to be in the know, and to enjoy the irony of its extremely stereotypical characters (such as the gay kid who enjoys dancing to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”), but at the same time to feel a wholesome glee in its colorful costumes and slick marketing.  This heightened reality in which characters sing works particularly well for characters like the dramatic Rachel Berry who dreams of Grammy awards and popular boyfriends, but also for the hapless Mr. Schuster who is trying to relive his glee club youth through his students.

Maybe what is interesting about these works is that teen years work well with musicals because both are about heightened realities, but both work as metaphors for life in general.  Joss Whedon mined high school and tropes of high school life in order to make larger arguments about the world in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and what Glee and Spring Awakening can do works along similar lines.  All of these texts require multigenerational audiences that can read their visuals at different levels of allusive comprehension.