by Alan Giles. @alanfgiles.
MOBILE, AL - In an effort to shake up the 2022 season, Freedom University has made the risqué choice to stage a production of Spring Awakening Jr. Jr as their spring musical.
“Just because we are conservative doesn’t mean we have no taste,” explained Theatre Department head Valerie Nash as she organized a bookcase of exclusively David Mamet scripts. “We love Spring Awakening. Once you cut out all of the sexual themes, vulgar dialogue, graphic death scenes, and gay characters, it’s a really beautiful musical. Almost as good as 1776.”
Eddie Jenkins, a junior at FU who has already been in an obnoxious amount of mainstage productions, is looking forward to the auditions.
“It’s a nice departure from our typical annual production of Godspell. I’m auditioning for the role of Melchior, of course,” stated Jenkins while leafing through a hymnal to find the perfect audition song. “His character is such a brilliant reminder that being rebellious in any way only leads to sin and self-destruction. Plus, I really want to sing ‘Totally Screwed’ on stage. Using such profanity would really make me feel like a bad boy!”
Theresa Murphy, a representative of Music Theatre International, claims that this newer version is quite different from the original book.
“With the amount of cuts and rewrites they’ve made to the script, I’d say it’s barely recognizable as Spring Awakening,” scoffed Murphy while drafting a very aggressive cease-and-desist email, unaware that any email critiquing the school is automatically filtered into spam. “They changed the setting from Germany to the United States. They changed Moritz’s cause of death from suicide to the COVID vaccine. They changed all of the songs about sex into songs about cancel culture. Really, the only detail from the original that they decided to keep is the fact that Wendla dies from getting an abortion. In fact, they spend about two-thirds of the show focusing on that.”
Following Spring Awakening Jr. Jr., FU intends to cap off the season with a production of Equus Jr. Jr. Jr., in which, a fully-clothed man befriends a horse on a completely platonic level. Audition sign-ups will be posted in the theatre department chapel directly below the Confederate flag.
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