‘Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known’: Jonathan Groff, Lea Michele on Which Songs Hit Different Now
Preview
If you’re a theater kid, you’re going to love the Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known documentary, premiering Monday, May 3 on HBO. Not just because it shows the full 2021 Spring Awakening reunion concert, and not because the musical is necessarily your favorite. But because it shows how it feels to be a teenager falling in love with musical theater for the first time.
Viewers will be transported to their high school musical theater programs, where your cast mates were your best friends, when you discovered theater’s ability to connect you to your humanity, and when you were probably feeling some raging hormones about a certain cast member. Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known shows all that and more. Except this cast just happened to be doing all of this on Broadway.
In this TV Insider exclusive, Jonathan Groff and Lea Michele — the OG Melchior Gabor and Wendla Bergmann — chat about the Spring Awakening reunion concert and documentary, sharing how the show feels different to them now, 16 years and many lifetimes later.
Groff (Hamilton, Mindhunter, Frozen) and Michele (Glee, Scream Queens) were teens when they started working on Spring Awakening, created by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater and directed by Michael Mayer, who all appear in the doc. After taking it through the workshop phase to its successful off-Broadway run with the Atlantic Theater Company, Spring Awakening opened on Broadway in 2006. But it barely filled the seats for months. It wasn’t until the rock musical was nominated for and won a slew of Tony Awards in 2007 — including Best Musical — that the show got butts in seats.
From that point on, Spring Awakening was a hit. And while it was a massive Broadway success, what the cast of high schoolers — which included Skylar Astin (Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist), John Gallagher Jr. (The Newsroom, Westworld), Gideon Glick (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), Krysta Rodriguez (Just One Kiss, Halston), and more — was experiencing was something every theater kid will immediately recognize in the documentary.
In addition to showing the majority of the 2021 reunion concert, Those You’ve Known features never-before-seen footage of behind-the-scenes moments, including a weekend retreat to Groff’s family home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where they slept in tents in the backyard and had lots of barbecues. The original Broadway cast members also share stories of their time in the show in solo interviews, revealing details Spring Awakening superfans are going to love.
HBO
Being so young when starting on the show, returning to the material 15 years later was undoubtedly going to bring new feelings. Like any theater kid, Groff and Michele used different songs of the show to cope with various feelings when they were younger. (Spring Awakening’s music is a particularly good tool for getting out all that teen angst.)
“I worked on Spring Awakening from 14 until 22, so I think that I went through a phase with a different song throughout all of those years, based on what I was feeling and experiencing at the time and what song helped me get through that,” Michele says. “The subject matter and themes of the show were just as relevant then as they are now, and that’s why we’re so grateful to have this documentary coming out. But as a mother, listening to ‘Left Behind,’ it hits you completely differently as a parent. I’m the mother of a son, so that for me meant one thing then, but it meant something completely, completely different now.”
“‘Those You’ve Known,’ I think is my favorite song I’ve ever experienced in my whole life, because there’s so much happening in that one,” Groff chimes in. “It’s like thoughts of suicide to thoughts of hopefulness to inner strength. The story of that song is so extreme and beautiful, and I remember getting a lot out when I was 21. Nothing literal, but it was a moment to emote and express. So I remember, back then, I would always look forward to that moment in the show to wring out the emotional towel.”
He continues, “This time around, ‘The Word of Your Body,’ as an adult — that feeling that you have when you’re young and you love someone so hard that it hurts. You’re not even conscious of how it’s going to devastate you in the future, but you just have this instinct about it. As an adult singing it again, I felt it and saw it from a different angle.”
Returning to the show for the reunion concert meant hearing every song from a new angle. Groff says the entire cast was experiencing “revelations” hearing the show’s poetic, emotive, intense lyrics with adult ears.
“We all were like, ‘We were singing about that?! We were saying that?! Stephen Spinella and Christine Eastbrook, who play the adults, were like, ‘Yeah, we knew that you really didn’t get some of it, but now you get what it’s like’ to look at this from an adult perspective, which speaks so much to the piece,” he says. “Because as a young person, you watch it, you feel seen, it’s this lifesaving piece of art. And as an adult, it’s the same thing, which was a revelation coming back to the material.”
Given all of that, Michele says performing the reunion concert — a fundraiser benefitting The Actors Fund during the COVID-19 pandemic — “was like a tsunami of emotions.” Watching the crowd reactions in the documentary proves it was like that for them, as well. (There’s a group of Spring Awakening superfans in the front row that are truly just a delight to watch.)
HBO
Spring Awakening is like a Stephen Sondheim show, where the breadth of characters and themes allows fans to age with the story, connecting to different songs at different points in their lives.
“The power of really great art is that you can revisit it at any age,” Groff says. “Like Sondheim when he was making Company, it was kind of like the first form-breaking musical. Spring Awakening is such an extreme form-breaking musical that it’s hard to describe. The show happened before social media, so now that there’s this record of this sort of ephemeral, magical, transformative quality of this show that is hard to talk about, now you can watch this documentary and understand the power of this piece.”
Speaking of Sondheim shows, many peoples’ entry into musical theater was watching filmed productions of his musicals on PBS. The original Broadway cast recording of Into The Woods used to be on Netflix (bring it back!), and there’s a scene in Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s Tick, Tick… BOOM! where Andrew Garfield and friends watch Sunday In the Park with George on PBS (both being form-breaking Sondheim shows).
For many millennials, Spring Awakening was that first form-breaking musical to debut in their formative years, but it was all about teenagers experiencing sexuality for the first time where Sondheim shows are largely stories for adults.
HBO
Decades ago, all we had was PBS. But now, streaming services are opening the doors for theater to change lives from home again. And it’s a delight to see the catalogue growing with things like Tick, Tick… BOOM!, Hamilton on Disney+, and now Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known. For younger audiences, these pieces will allow them to discover musical theater for the first time and fall in love. For older millennials, it lets them return to a story that started it all and reminds them of the magical experience that was their first musical. Sondheim would be proud.
Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known also stars Lauren Pritchard, Gerard Canonico, Lilli Cooper, Jennifer Damiano, Robert Hager, Brian Johnson, Phoebe Strole, Jonny B. Wright, and Remy Zaken. And yes, you’ll finally learn what the heck a “purple summer” is.
Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known, Documentary Premiere, Tuesday, May 3, 9 p.m. ET, HBO & HBO Max
