Parkland Survivors Get a Broadway Master Class in Healing

BOCA RATON, Fla. — On a Tuesday evening in a small theater in the back of a shopping center here, the teenage cast of the rock musical “Spring Awakening” pogoed around the stage, shouting the unprintable lyrics from one of its most ferocious songs.

Ever since the show opened on Broadway in 2006, collecting eight Tony Awards, it has attracted a fervid teenage following and is steadily performed in high schools and colleges. But most young casts haven’t survived a catastrophe that dovetails eerily with the show’s plot. They haven’t galvanized a movement that has made each rehearsal a potential target.

And they haven’t had the chance to take a break from all that by singing the score with most of the show’s original Broadway cast belting and bouncing right beside them.

Lea Michele, who went on to star on “Glee,” arrived at the Boca Black Box theater with a face red from sunburn. It turned redder with emotion. Jonathan Groff, previously on Broadway in “Hamilton,” now on Netflix’s “Mindhunter,” headbanged beneath a New York Mets baseball cap.

The professional performers were in the audience at the theater, which is 10 miles from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the site of the Feb. 14 school shooting that left 17 dead. A third of the cast members in this local “Spring Awakening,” a production of Barclay Performing Arts, a training and theater company, are students at the school.

They began rehearsals five weeks before the shooting and they insisted on continuing after. The show opens May 2.

As Broadway musicals go, “Spring Awakening,” with music by Duncan Sheik and book and lyrics by Steven Sater, is arguably the worst show that a town in South Florida could stage right now. Or if you believe in catharsis, in theater’s ability to transmute painful feelings into something constructive and cleansing, maybe it’s the best.

Based on Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play, it’s a story of adolescents failed by an older generation, with tragic results. The character of Melchior, which vaulted Groff to stardom and is played here by 17-year-old Never Again activist Cameron Kasky, sings a second-act number flanked by the ghosts of a dead friend and a dead lover.

But for many of the students, rehearsal has been a reprieve, a temporary escape from real-life dramas.

As Sawyer Garrity, 16, who plays Melchior’s lover Wendla (Michele’s role), said before rehearsal began: “Nothing has been normal. This isn’t even fully normal.” (Because of death threats some of the students have received, a police cruiser waits in the parking lot during every rehearsal.) “But this is the one place where I’m centered,” she said.

When Broadway actor Gideon Glick read about the production in a New Yorker article, he reached out to its director, Christine Barclay, asking if a visit would be welcome. With her approval, he began to muster his former castmates.

Many of the actors had flown in that day. Several of them were bunking together at a house Remy Zaken had borrowed. Lilli Cooper couldn’t make it — she’s starring in “SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical.” But she FaceTimed the girl playing Martha, her “Spring Awakening” role.

Theater-world support has become a part of this new not-normal. Every current Broadway show has provided the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Drama Club with signed posters or similar swag. The evening before this rehearsal some of the “Spring Awakening” student actors had performed alongside “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” cast members in a benefit concert called “From Broadway With Love.”

But even generosity can breed exhaustion and complicate grieving. After the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, there were so many fundraisers and celebrity stop-ins that Newtown’s first selectman requested an end to outside events in town.

With that in mind, Glick hadn’t publicized the visit and he and Barclay had conceived it as a respite with occasional music, a chance for the young actors to chat “Hair” with Groff and “Glee” with Michele, to “feel good and supported,” he said, speaking by telephone the week before.

Barclay wanted that, too. But she also hoped that the professional actors could counsel the students on taking characters to a dark place without staying there themselves, on making it “not so personal and raw,” she said a few days before the Broadway actors arrived.

In the theater, after the breathless warmup, the rehearsal began in earnest, with the original cast watching from three and four rows back. “They’re here to support your rehearsal. They’re not here to cast you in the next Broadway show,” Barclay said.

“I wish someone would cast me in the next Broadway show,” Skylar Astin, who played Georg onstage, murmured jokingly.

Performing in front of the invited guests wasn’t always easy. Alfonso Calderon, 17, had to mime masturbation right in front of what he called “his celebrity crushes and dreams.” He looked ashen when he finished the scene, although he still managed to compliment Astin on the “Pitch Perfect” movies.

The Broadway actors praised the vulnerability and even the discomfort of some of the student actors.

“I can see in your faces and on your bodies what we felt as well when we were first doing the show,” Phoebe Strole said during a break. “It’s like taking your heart out of your chest and shoving it at us.” “But you also have to be loud, guys,” Glick said, adding an apologetic, “I don’t want to be like a Jewish mother here.”

“Please Jewish mother them,” Barclay said. (A new mother herself, she’d brought her 2-month-old baby to the rehearsal.)

Eventually a prop gun required by the script would be used, but Barclay hadn’t introduced it yet. No one wanted to mention the shooting head-on, although there were some oblique references to Valentine’s Day.

When a question for the Broadway actors seemed to veer that way, Kasky, who had spent most of the rehearsal threatening to break into “Under the Sea” from “The Little Mermaid,” tensed up. “We want to talk less about the shooting,” he said. His character cried during a funeral scene in a way that seemed to bypass technique.

The professional actors had advice on handling the hard stuff.

“You choose when you want to use what you went through to cry or to laugh or do whatever, and if you don’t, if you just want to go into the song, you can do that, too,” Michele said.

The younger actors studied their counterparts as though searching for clues about what their own lives would be 12 years from now. But mostly they wanted to be near the people who had sung the same songs and mumbled the same speeches and known what it is to show up for rehearsal with a face full of pimples or perform a love scene when your own body is still a mystery.

“I felt like, ‘Am I going to have to pretend I have any clue what I’m doing?'” Groff confessed.

The Broadway actors, meanwhile, were confronted with visions of their teenage selves and clutched each other while the students sang. At times they sang along quietly, unable to help themselves, lifting the cast up with the harmonies they still remembered.

“It was really cool,” Ethan Kaufman, a 15-year-old Stoneman Douglas student said. “I am awe-struck.” The feeling was mutual. An hour after rehearsal ended, the 2006 Ilse huddled with the 2018 one. A group of boys circled Astin as he took them through the Latin chants that the characters in the show recite. The Broadway actors didn’t want the evening or this happy-sad reunion to end.

“Tonight we do the show starting from the top at Remy’s house,” Michele said.