Will "Spring" Awaken At The Box Office?

"Spring Awakening" is easily the best new musical of the Broadway season -- fun, sexy and with a great score by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater. You'll have to wait till Sunday to read my feature on the show for the NY Daily News. Meanwhile, the NYPost's Michael Riedel points out that the show is positively slumbering at the box office and the people behind it aren't sure of how to market the musical. Since the creatives don't seem touchy on the subject, I'd stick with the obvious: this is the new "Rent." The job of promoting it will become much easier once the reviews appear after the Sunday premiere -- assuming they're just as ecstatic as the ones the show got Off Broadway. The only wild card is the all-important review from the NYTimes. And the Post's Barbara Hoffman has a fine piece about casting the show's young stars via MySpace. The only wrong note is her description of the character Hanschen as "sexually ambivalent." Hardly. Hanschen -- as played with hilarious self-confidence by Jonathan B. Wright -- is anything but ambivalent. He is delightfully, completely, supremely gay and goes after his conquest with rapacious, self-satisfied joy.