This article is taken from the February 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issue for just £10.

Alarming teenage suicide cults and hidden abuse, moral panics about whether the young know enough about sex or are getting too much of it and useless (or worse) adults — it’s all very now. It is also all very Frank Wedekind in his play set in provincial Germany in the early 1890s. 

A raw saga of lust and deeper longing, intergenerational strife and tragedies fomented by educational and sexual repression, Max Reinhardt directed the (censored) premiere of Spring Awakening in 1906. It’s not surprising that its themes resonate more than a century on so that a work which saw Wedekind trying out genres of naturalism, expressionism and mysticism should end up as a long-runner on Broadway, with music and lyrics by the Broadway duo Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater. 

It is also the Almeida boss Rupert Goold’s choice to direct at the Islington theatre which punches above its weight — recently with Saoirse Ronan as Lady Macbeth. Youthful frustration at Covid lockdowns and the COP26 era are in the air with lots of shouty vocal work behind the big numbers (“Totally Fucked” being the most on-the-nose energetic). 

For all the alt-rock vibe, it is pretty faithful to Wedekind’s story of adolescent girls and boys charting the hormonal rollercoaster without sex education to protect them, and a rebellious coupling between Melchior and Wendla which will unleash a torrent of events, mainly horrible.

For me, it was too Woke a Wedekind to find stirring

There are, however, shortcomings to stripping the proto-Nazi vibrations from the play. It is true that all the social demons of Wedekind’s time are still around us in family abuse, ignorance of birth control and heedless encounters by young men keener to exercise their erotic appeal than anticipate the consequences. 

Yet the stretch from that to the morose Greta doctrine of “You terrible grown ups have stolen our future and we are very cross” feels so-very-Islington that we lose the sense of period needed to ground a historic work, however strong the parallels today. 

The staging — essentially a big set of steps with ingenious holes and hinges to allow for expressionist scene changes between the various households and settings —holds together an episodic work. Alas the terror of Wedekind’s brutal view of sex in the sado-masochist courtship of the two youngsters and the uneven nature of their first encounter is low key — is it passion fulfilled or statutory rape, given that he knows what sex entails and she does not? The adaptation is frustratingly ambigous about a central question.

Still, kudos to a cast which mixes experienced and less experienced performers. Laurie Kynaston is excellent as Melchior. Omicron-induced substitutions of newcomers include Asha Banks who was understudying Wendla on the night I saw it. For me, it was too Woke a Wedekind to find stirring. And a footnote on the libertine dramatist — he didn’t like his trip to London as his diaries An Erotic Life record, finding, “nothing new and very little that’s congenial. I spend some time in a bar amid a pack of frightful whores, and go to bed at twelve o’clock.” He’d probably have been cancelled all over again in 2021.

I stayed with stories of creativity unleashed and family strife for a recovery outing to Jersey Boys at the Trafalgar Studios — a juke-box musical commemoration of the band that became The Four Seasons, changing names and line-ups over two decades whilst bringing us pop delights from “Can’t take my eyes off you” to “Walk like a man” and “Sherry”. 

The star of the show, of course, is Frankie Valli (Ben Joyce) with frenemy Bob Gaudio (Adam Bailey) accompanying (a chance pairing after the two attended a failed audition) and Tommy de Vito (a wonderfully acerbic Benjamin Yates) who narrates the first of the musical’s four “seasons”, the quartet’s recollections of stardom and starbursts. Valli’s multi-octave command and a sense of male, blue-collar vulnerability beyond the bluster is deftly channelled by Joyce throughout all the tribulations, not least when he’s condemned to singing “My Mother’s Eyes” for the local mafia boss to help buy the band out of trouble.

We mumbled into our masks instead and put our loving hands up in the air within the bounds of decency

This is not a musical that asks us to think very deeply about anything beyond the price of aspiration and stardom, mingled with bad life choices, but there is something about hearing the hits in their original context which channels the electric connection between The Four Seasons and working class America. While The Beatles sweep the hearts and minds of the college-educated on their smash tour in 1964, the Seasons keep the ensemble on the road from one backwater hotel to the next — and the temptations of Vegas, where one of their number ends up banned from every casino. 

How good was the music? Good enough for everyone to know some of it and a remarkably good job is made of recreating the Jersey sound. Frankie’s marriage to Mary Mandel, a glamorous Jersey harridan, falls apart in acrimony, leaving behind a shattered family and one of the loveliest songs about unrequited desire ever written in “My Eyes Adored You”. A tragic climax to their daughter Francine’s life reflects the fact that she knew her famous father better from TV than his presence in the family. 

It should, of course, be a singalong ending. We mumbled into our masks instead and put our loving hands up in the air within the bounds of decency. Thumbs up too for the Trafalgar’s reasonable pricing. Dramatically, The Jersey Boys has hits and misses but a plucky cast nails the high notes. Frankly, my ears adored it.