Glee may have made Lea Michele an overnight star, but before she put on that red T-shirt and belted “Don’t Stop Believin’” with Cory Monteith, she starred opposite Jonathan Groff in the musical Spring Awakening. Set in Germany in the 1890s, the critically acclaimed coming-of-age rock musical launched both Michele and Groff’s careers when it premiered on Broadway in 2006.
Last November, Michele and Groff joined the original cast of Spring Awakening for a one-night-only performance in celebration of the show’s 15-year anniversary. The reunion is the basis for HBO’s upcoming documentary, Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known.
This will be Michele’s first major project since several of her Glee co-stars came forward to accuse her of toxic behavior on set. The controversy began in the summer of 2020 when the actress tweeted a message of support for the George Floyd protesters and the Black Lives Matter movement. In response, Samantha Ware, who played Jane Hayward in the sixth season of Glee tweeted in all caps, “Remember when you made my first television gig a living hell?!?! Cause I’ll never forget.” She went on to accuse Michele of committing “traumatic microaggressions” and threatening to “shit in [her] wig.”
Michele replied with a classic celebrity damage control device, the Notes app apology message posted to Instagram, writing, “While I don’t remember ever making this specific statement and I have never judged others by their background or color of their skin, that’s not really the point, what matters is that I acted in ways which hurt other people.” However, her apology did not deter other former co-stars, including Amber Riley and Heather Morris, from confirming that Michele was nothing short of a nightmare to work with.
Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known is doubling as an image rehab of sorts.
“There was never anything like this that’s ever happened on stage,” says cast member Lauren Pritchard-Cobb in the trailer for the film. Pritchard-Cobb is referring to the laundry list of touchy subjects Spring Awakening tackles in its frank exploration of adolescent sexuality—abortion, rape, suicide, masturbation, and a lot of sex.
Adapted from Frank Wedekind’s controversial 1891 play of the same name, Spring Awakening tells the story of a group of schoolchildren victimized by a sexually oppressive culture, left to fend for themselves without the proper tools or knowledge to deal with the changes of puberty. In other words, it’s basically a 19th-century manifesto for sex ed.
With a book and lyrics by Steven Sater and an incredible pop-rock score by Duncan Sheik, Spring Awakening opened to rave reviews, eventually scoring eight Tony Awards. “We became rock stars,” Michele recalls in the trailer for the documentary. It intersperses old footage and photos with clips from the reunion. We see the cast revisiting some of the endlessly catchy songs, like ode to angst “The Bitch of Living,” which may be the horniest song ever performed on a Broadway stage.
“The things that we confront in this show are not things you can learn in school,” Pritchard-Cobb says towards the end of the preview. “And they’re things that help people survive.”
Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known premieres on May 3 on HBO Max.
