Spring Awakening

Friday, 23 January 2009 - Saturday, 14 March 2009

Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, King Street, Hammersmith, W6 0QL

How Much: £30.00 (Highest Price) , £10.00 (Lowest Price)

Another coup for the Lyric as they secure the UK premiere of this unlikely Broadway smash about adolescent boys in a German boarding school. And we do mean unlikely. There's a singularity of vision about this show, which takes a scandalous 19th century play about wanking, taking drugs and trying to have sex with everybody, and gives it a rock n roll soundtrack.

What's extra surprising is that the creators of the show (Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater, working from the 1991 play by Frank Wedekind) have resisted the temptation to move the play to 50s America. Instead, they boldly lay down an anachronistic soundtrack of rock over an otherwise period piece. While the traumas and pleasures of adolescence are timeless, this play gives 19th century schoolboys a voice that wasn't even invented for another 60 years. It works.

Spring Awakening was an unheralded smash on Broadway in 2008 and arrives at the ever-experimental Lyric with a new, English cast. It promises to be an unusual treat for fans of musical theatre that thinks outside the constraints of the West End formula.