By Jasmine Peregrina and Sevinch Nasimova 

Mr. Donald Tuel knew directing the musical, Spring Awakening, would raise some concerns.

But even when he and the school received pushback from some parents and teachers early on about this latest production, he still felt that the show must go on.

“It’s about adults not listening to teenagers and adults just ignoring all the difficult hard things that everyone was going through,” said Mr. Tuel. “It was kind of ironic how some of the adults in this building didn’t want us to do it,  because we can’t just pretend like these things don’t happen.

On May 18th-20th, the school’s theater department performed Spring Awakening, which is a coming-of-age rock musical portraying the struggles of 19th century German teenagers.

The show, which was held in the Joseph Anzalone Theatre, deals with mature themes such as suicide, adult language, sexual abuse, abortion and there was even an on-stage sexual encounter which had to be choreographed very carefully.

According to assistant principal of Communication Arts Ms. Gayle Zeitlin, a PTA meeting was held with some parents to address the show and how they felt about it. 

“We knew that there could be some parents that would have concerns, “ she said. “But we met with parents in a PTA meeting, and we addressed all the concerns, and after they met us they felt more comfortable with the show, and we moved forward with it and after the show we received positive messages.”

Mr. Tuel said that even though the musical had mature themes he made little to no changes to the script. 

“No, we didn’t even have to edit it at all, “ he said. “Well, that’s not true we changed the song that had the F-word, and we were given permission by the writers to change the F-word to F-ed, but we didn’t have to change anything else it was exactly as written.”

Mr. Tuel said he just loved doing this show.

“It’s one of my favorites,” he said. “It’s very timely and all the characters are teenagers and it’s universal. It doesn’t matter how old you are if you go and see it and you’re like `Oh yeah, I went through that once.’”

This show was picked because the director and other staff felt that the show had messages that were relevant to teenagers and opened a safe space for teenagers to talk about mature topics.

“Mr. Tuel and I spent a long time talking about this along with (principal) Mr. (Allen) Barge and we really felt that as educators we needed to provide students with the space and opportunity to discuss topics that are important and relevant to them,” said Ms. Zeitlin. 

Some student actors said they did feel nervous when it came to performing their scenes that mentioned a mature topic but knew the significance of them. 

“I think it’s important to display that in some ways because those topics shouldn’t be shunned from discussion, but I wanted to make sure I dealt with those parts of my role in a way that didn’t feel like some caricature,” said Olive Spence.