This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking about Lea Michele’s vagina.
It’s been everywhere—which is to say in headlines, tweets, breathless news stories, and at the center of every single conversation I’ve had with any human I’ve encountered. “That vagina story’s crazy, right?” “Sir, I asked if you wanted guac on your burrito. It’s extra.”
That story is from the new documentary Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known, which chronicles the rehearsal process for an unlikely reunion of the Broadway musical’s original cast for a 15th anniversary concert and finds them revisiting what it was like to mount the surprise Tony-winning phenomenon.
It premieres Tuesday on HBO. I’ve seen it, and cried and cried and cried. Yes, I was even moved by the vagina anecdote.
The undeniably memorable moment was teased in an early report about what happens in the documentary. Michele, who starred as repressed teenager Wendla, and co-star Jonathan Groff, who played the lead and her romantic interest Melchior, were discussing the swift intimacy with which they formed a friendship. At the time, Groff was in the closet, even to his closest friends and confidants. Michele was madly in love with him. Obviously. It is Jonathan Groff. Get in line, Lea.
“Jonathan and I became so close. We were so intertwined,” she explains in the film. “At one point, I literally showed him my whole vagina… He was like, ‘I’ve never seen a woman’s vagina before. Would you show me?’ And I was like, ‘Sure.’ And I took a desk lamp… and showed him. That’s how close we are.”
Out of context, it’s outrageous. People were baffled. For a star who has spent the last year digging herself back from an avalanche of bad press over allegations from former colleagues of toxic on-set behavior, saying this out loud on camera seemed like yet another tone-deaf, preposterous misstep.
But context, of course, is everything. (You could flatten me with a speck of falling dust, I’m so shocked that something went viral online without any context.)
The thing is, in the documentary it’s an organic, relevant story, part of a beautiful sequence in which the two stars are candid about their relationship and what it was like for a confused boy from Lancaster, PA, to come to terms with his sexuality while cannon-blasting to Broadway stardom, and then how she saw her role as his support system.
She’s incredibly charming and funny while she tells it, but also so compassionate and empathetic to what Groff was going through. Believe it or not, the Lea Michele’s “whole vagina” story is a poignant moment.
Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known is somewhat revelatory in the way it uses the emotional reunion of these stars to reconsider and recontextualize.
With Michele, it’s a reminder of how magnetic and effortlessly humorous she is. There’s a lot of self-awareness there about her personality, a surprise given that the controversy surrounding her past behavior would suggest otherwise. It also makes a case for redemption. Any time she is singing or performing in the concert, you’re spellbound. Variations on marveled whispers of “she’s just so damned talented…” bubbled from just about every conversation I overheard from the crowd who was at the early screening I attended. Groff erupts in tears the second she begins singing the opening song “Mama Who Bore Me” at the first rehearsal.
Especially with musical theater obsessives side-eyeing the decidedly mixed reviews Beanie Feldstein received for her performance as Fanny Brice in the just-opened revival of Funny Girl, a role that Michele has made no secret of campaigning for over the years but was likely disqualified from once her scandal became such a major story, her easy candor and soul-shaking vocals raise the question about whether there’s a path for a comeback. Is now the time for a Lea Michelaissance?
But there wouldn’t be any inclination to crave that comeback if the documentary itself weren’t so successful in its nimble cross-stitch of heartbreak and inspiration when it comes to nostalgia. This is a musical that tackles teenage sex and hormones, mental health, abuse, homosexuality, suicide, and abortion, but it’s also about being seen and validated for who you are and how you feel at a volatile time coming of age.
To watch Groff and the cast grapple with what it meant to them to play those themes 15 years ago—and then to do so again now with the passage of time and the ensuing wisdom of life experience—is fascinating, and heartrending. I remember being in college and seeing the show multiple times when it first opened, being blown away by it—like Groff, closeted and in New York trying to figure things out, maybe not even sure why it meant so much.
But it wasn’t until watching the cast perform in the documentary and talk about these things that I realized just how formative the original production, its score, and these characters may actually have been.
Great art makes you think in that way. So does Lea Michele’s vagina.
