Possibilities awakening

MICHAEL MAYER threads his way into a Chelsea restaurant, having just come from the orthopedist. During the summer, he had been walking on what he thought was just a sore ankle. Turns out, after diagnosis, to be what the doctor called a broken navicular.

“The doctor said to me, ‘You’ve been walking on this for two months? You must have a very high pain threshold,’ ” recalls the 46-year-old Mayer. “And I said, ‘Honey, I’m a director of Broadway musicals. You bet I have a very high pain threshold.’ ”

That threshold may be tested in the coming months, not by those who usually inflict pain on Broadway directors -- the critics -- but by the general theatergoing public. For “Spring Awakening,” which Mayer directed and nurtured over a long gestation period, opened on Broadway last month to universal raves as the most daring and ambitious new musical in years. And that has set up the show as this season’s most fascinating cultural litmus test: whether a modest musical -- with no stars, one set, an alternative rock score and a story line based on an 1891 German tragedy about provincial teens -- can prosper in a $120-a-ticket milieu increasingly dominated by lavish spectacle, jukebox musicals, self-referential comedies and family fare.

Perhaps aware of the stakes, the critics were unqualified in their praise, largely echoing Charles Isherwood’s description of the musical in the New York Times as “brave ... haunting and electrifying,” going on to express the fragile hope that “Broadway, with its often puerile sophistication and its sterile romanticism, may never be the same.”

Such critical exuberance did give “Spring Awakening” a boost at the box office (it took in about $2 million in the week after opening) and set chat rooms buzzing about whether it: (a) deserved the accolades and (b) could survive through the slow winter months to take advantage of awards, including the Tony for best musical, for which it is a strong contender.

Though the jury is still out on the show’s commercial success, what is clear is that the public’s embrace will come on the terms set by the creative team of Mayer, Duncan Sheik -- the maverick rock composer (“Barely Breathing”) who wrote the music, and Steven Sater, the off-Broadway playwright, screenwriter and poet who penned the book and lyrics.

“We have not pandered at all,” Mayer says. “Broadway was never in our sights. When we started with that brief workshop Annie Hamburger gave us [at the La Jolla Playhouse], we just wanted to be able to get it on a stage wherever, whenever. It took eight years.”

But Mayer is as persistent as he is protean. One would scarcely think him a potential savior of the musical art form as the director of such innocuous fare as the revival of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” the Tony-winning “Thoroughly Modern Millie” or even the recent remake of a classic horse film, “Flicka.”

But as the onetime wunderkind who directed the 1995 national tour of “Angels in America” and followed up with the Tony-winning “Sideman,” an acclaimed revival of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” and the film “A Home at the End of the World,” Mayer has never shied away from dark and sophisticated subject matter.

“Michael allows the material to speak to him, and he answers it,” says Tom Hulce, the actor-turned-producer who with Ira Pittelman, Jeffrey Richards and Jerry Frankel transferred “Spring Awakening” from its showcase run at the Atlantic Theatre last summer. “He has this unique ability to celebrate what is fun, comedic and musically thrilling about first discoveries -- and yet he can be unflinching about exploring the dead serious and deeply powerful aspects of this kind of story.”

The material Sheik and Sater brought to Mayer certainly demanded the latter. Frank Wedekind’s German classic created a scandal with its taboo topics of masturbation, sadomasochism, homosexuality, sexual abuse, suicide and abortion. In the play, the first stirrings of love and desire are tragically warped by the puritanical repression and the ignorance of parents and teachers. Mayer says that although he was attracted to the story, he was uncertain that the songs could work in the way the writers were insisting.

Sheik and Sater were adamant their score be created in a contemporary rock idiom through which the characters would express their inner thoughts and feelings. At no time were the protagonists to sing to each other, nor would the often poetically dense songs necessarily advance plot or character as is the norm in musicals. “We came to Michael because we were confident he would still allow us to bring something original to the form itself while fulfilling its requirements,” says Sater, who had worked with Mayer on readings of his earlier work.

The solution, says Mayer, came with an early vision for the show: A youthful group of actors -- cast as young as possible for authenticity -- would be dressed in the staid woolen britches, smocks and shifts of the period, out of which they would pull microphones when called upon to sing. In the play -- which Sater transformed from Wedekind’s episodic death march into an exuberant, if equally tragic, hero’s journey -- the actors are their respective characters: the handsome Melchior, his love interest, Wendla, and his best buddy, the hapless Moritz. But when they sing, they move into rock concert mode, a shift emphasized by the lyrics themselves (i.e. “The Bitch of Living,” “The Dark I Know So Well”) and the stylized choreography created by modern dance great Bill T. Jones.

By resolutely remaining true to period and the story’s fatalism, “Spring Awakening” advanced on “Rent,” its closest predecessor, which chose to update another classic tragedy, “La Boheme,” but moved its setting to the East Village and prettified its bleak ending by allowing Mimi to live.

“Spring Awakening” did not, however, eschew all convention. Sater recalls that Mayer pushed the songwriters repeatedly for the proverbial “I Want” song -- in which a musical theater hero traditionally recounts his or her central desires. Just before opening to critics at the Atlantic, they delivered “All That’s Known,” Melchior’s declaration of rebellion and defiance early in the first act.

“It became this hybrid rock concert and play,” says Mayer, “so Jonathan Groff is Melchior, but when he sings, he’s Jonathan Groff. There’s still some textual relationship because of what he is singing, but it’s a different context. The challenge for the actors is to remain as emotionally invested in whatever parallel story they have created for themselves as in the characters they are playing.”

After one ventures that the shift, as performed, may be so subtle as to escape some of the audience members, the director responds that it matters little whether they understand it. “What’s important is that they feel the shift and that their emotions are stirred. From our very first workshop, I said, ‘From 1891 to 2007, the times have changed, the plot has changed, the facts of teenagers’ lives are different. But there is one thing that has remained the same: the emotions, the fear, the confusion, the ache, the joy. And it is that emotional life that connects all of us.’ ”

Memories of his own teenage years

IN developing “Spring Awakening,” Mayer unearthed his own pubescent emotions as a scared, skinny teenager growing up in Rockville, Md., the eldest of three born to Jerry, a labor lawyer, and Lou, a housewife and political activist.

Unlike the caricatured authority figures in “Spring Awakening,” his parents were liberal and enlightened. But even then he found it difficult, if not impossible, to reveal to them his secret life, such as his incipient homosexuality and that he was stealing some of their marijuana stash. (His mother eventually “outed” Mayer to himself, after he broke up with yet another girlfriend. “Don’t you think you’re gay?” he recalls his mother saying. “It’s OK if you are.”)

Mayer took refuge from the growing pains through his friendships with women, bonding with male buddies who’d protect him from being shoved into lockers, his record albums (Elton John, Simon and Garfunkel, Laura Nyro), and classic movies (including the seminally influential “Wizard of Oz” and “To Kill a Mockingbird”). “That yearning for connection always got me,” says Mayer. “I’m not interested in irony. I understand that parody has its place. But it’s too easy to be above it all, to make fun of something.”

Dealing with genuine sentiment and emotion will continue to be the ruling leitmotif of his works, he says, which include a film he is developing with Sandra Bullock on the life of “Peyton Place” author Grace Metalious and a new musical, to debut at the Atlantic Theatre Company, with pop singer and composer Patty Griffin. He is also working with Henry Krieger (“Dreamgirls”) on a musical adaptation of “The Flamingo Kid” and is keen on reviving the Alan Jay Lerner-Burton Lane musical “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever” for the stage, after which he hopes the movie gods will allow him to remake it as a film.

As someone who has experienced both poles of the marketplace in film and theater, Mayer says he can only concentrate on the work and hope the commerce takes care of itself. Describing himself as “guardedly optimistic” that “Spring Awakening” will settle in for a long run, he says he’s resigned to the arbitrary nature of a business that can club you one minute, praise you the next.

“It was a white-knuckle job for all of us. We never sought out to revolutionize Broadway, we didn’t think Broadway needed revolutionizing,” he says with a laugh. “But it gives me great heart to look at something like ‘Grey Gardens’ this season and ‘Sweeney Todd’ last season and think, ‘Hey, maybe there is an audience for serious musicals.’ ”