New York City Theater

After partying into late Sunday night with the SPRING AWAKENING cast and its hundreds of producers, I decided it was time for me to take a break - wait maybe a few months till I go back to see it again.

Then I woke up the next morning to an offer from a friend to use his spare onstage seat for that night's performance. As it happens, my grandparents were attending tonight, and I was very curious as to what their reaction to the show would be, so I took up the offer.

I sat onstage four times when the show was Off-Broadway, but had yet to do so on Broadway. Though onstage seating has its issues - you miss essentially all the lighting effects, and the actors' backs are often turned to you - I truly prefer it to sitting most anywhere in the theater. Sitting alongside the actors at the side of the stage is a truly intimate experience that cannot be paralleled elsewhere.

The performance was sold out, with a nice cancellation line stemming through 49th Street. When the cast entered, it was greated with a minute-long applause. The cast, after all, was walking onstage for the first time as the winners of the Best Musical Award. And John Gallagher Jr. received a well-deserved round of entrance applause when the schoolmaster woke him up in the second scene.

At curtain call, during the the third round of bows, Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik were brought onstage from their seats in the third row of the orchestra to bow with the cast. The applause still would not die down. Suddenly, Michael Mayer, also present, ran through the audience and onto the stage, gave Gallagher a huge hug, and joined the cast and his co-creators in another bow.

Not since AVENUE Q have I sensed such a sense of community amongst a Broadway musical cast and its fans. Though a show like SPAMALOT or JERSEY BOYS also has its share of fans, they are not the kind who will return over and over again to the show, partly cause tickets for those are not as easy to come by - or in the case of SPAMALOT, were hard to come by two years ago. At SPRING, it's great to see that it's doing well, but thanks to its generous student rush policy and the onstage seats, a SPRING fan can easily see the show over and over again at liberty in a RENT style.

Tonight was a truly electric performance. The entire cast was in except for Hanschen, with Matt Doyle stepping in. Doyle was quite good in the role, but will need more work till he can parallel Jonathan B. Wright's brilliantly campy performance in his makeout scene with Gideon Glick.

So, should I now take a break from SPRING AWAKENING - maybe two months or so? We'll see what happens.