When the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School began rehearsals for the musical “Spring Awakening,” they couldn’t have possibly foreseen the tragedy that would ensue months before the show opened. But, as the old theatre saying goes, “The show must go on.”
“Even after everything that happened, we need this show now more than ever,” Sawyer Garrity, one of the six survivors of Parkland shooting, told Local 10 News. Garrity plays Wendla, the female lead, in “Spring Awakening”, which opened on Wednesday.
Although rehearsals began before the shooting, the musical could not be more perfect for the student activists involved in it. As The New Yorker explains, “The musical shows what happens when neglectful adults fail to make the world safe or comprehensible for teenagers, and the onus that neglect puts on kids to beat their own path forward.”
Spring Awakening opening night is done. So proud of this unbelievably talented cast.
So nice seeing the community come together to show their support. Thank you all and remember to walk alongside those you’ve lost and never forget them. See their thoughts are known, not gone. pic.twitter.com/8sdiCg4c4c
— Cameron Kasky (@cameron_kasky) May 3, 2018
“It’s about teenagers using their voice and standing up to adults, which is just so relevant to what’s going on now,” Garrity told Local 10.
For the opening night of the show, audience members included writers from Vanity Fair and the New York Times, as well as musical’s creators, Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik.
As Sater told The New Yorker, “Perhaps only Wedekind [whose poem inspired this musical] could have imagined, among this ‘Columbine generation,’ a young hero, a Melchior, like Cameron Kasky, like Emma González, like Ryan Deitsch, capable of standing so strong, of speaking the bald truth to the ever-collected, if contorted, face of power.”