Spring Awakening

Spring Awakening at freeFall is one of the most important shows of my career. It launched me on the Tampa theater scene, started a long working relationship with freeFall, and is the show where I met my wife.

Design-wise it was big and flashy and surprisingly intimate at the same time. The room was small but the music carried operatic-rock energy. In retrospect, Spring Awakening is also the earliest example of the two-worlds framework I’ve used for most of my musical theater work since: a song world that heightens reality (saturated color, dynamic angles, musicality driving the cues) and a book world that stays grounded in real space (naturalism, time of day, color temperature mostly carrying the storytelling). The two worlds played against each other constantly through the show. The audience learned to read the transitions visually, which meant the songs could land harder and the dialogue could stay quiet without the design fighting either.