Spring Awakening Analysis - Blog Posts

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can we talk about Spring Awakening real quick

The fact that Ilse opens “The Song of Purple Summer” is an incredibly important and meaningful detail that escaped me when I first listened to Spring Awakening.

Ilse is one of my favorite SA characters (and one of my favorite musical theatre characters in general), largely because she is 100% coded as the symbol of hope and escapism throughout the show…until we actually get a chance to meet her and let her breathe and let her talk and we realize that she traded one type of pain, one type of abuse for another. She’s subverted in this really clever way when we discover that she’s just another teenager, another human, and she’s hurting just like everyone else in the show.

Really, she’s almost as ‘broken’ as Moritz is, just in different ways.

And the fact that it’s not Wendla, not Martha, but Ilse, the symbol of hope whose humanity brutally shatters the illusion of “escape” for the rest of the young characters, the fact that she’s the one who gets to sing this gorgeous metaphor about carrying on and putting your pieces back together, that is beautiful.