When my collaborators and I began planning a production of Spring Awakening, we felt it was important to tell this story in an entirely new way to reflect the world as it is now. We examined the music in the piece and how music has always been an outlet for love, rage, discovery, and expression throughout history. We discovered an inherent musicality in the show that goes far beyond how most musicals typically incorporate their songs. Each character seemed to be "voiced" by a different instrument, and we leveraged the show's orchestration to deepen the dramatization of each character’s journey. The rock style of the show enters and exits the score with Moritz, so he led his songs on the electric guitar. Wendla's musical vocabulary is led by a violin, curious and bold in her moments of discovery and broken pizzicato when she is at her most vulnerable.

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Most productions of Spring Awakening feature an abrupt switch between the moments of dialogue and music, but we wanted to allow each character the agency to transition into that musical space, both diegetically and within the context of musical theatre. For example, the character Martha has a song about domestic abuse, where a cello leads the orchestration. In our production, you would see Martha’s cello offered to her, allowing her to decide to accept it and strike the opening notes as she exorcises her pain through the song. Every transition into the musical world was motivated similarly, and each character had their own relationship to the world of song.

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A church in Brooklyn became home to a jam session of actor-musicians who expressed themselves through playing music, all with the belief that we can heal, learn, and grow together through a collective experience.