One would have thought that one of the few benefits to deafness was that it would tend to limit one’s exposure to rock musicals. “You’ve got two tickets to ‘Rent,’ have you? Can’t make it, I’m afraid. Deaf as a post, don’t you know. Musical appreciation diminished in proportion. Send my regrets to those tatterdemalion hermaphrodites and their dancing hypodermic needles, will you? I’ll be home with a good book. No, I don’t want the bloody T-shirt they sell in the lobby.”
Comes 2015, the era of strenuously achieved, or at least attempted, “inclusion” and . . . there’s a musical for the deaf on Broadway. It is Spring Awakening (the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, through January 24), a revival of the richly praised 2006 Broadway show that was based on a German play by Franz Wedekind set in 1891 and first performed in 1906. The piece this time is performed in two languages: English and American Sign Language, with the cast divided between those possessed of hearing and those bereft of it.
Never for a moment is this feature anything other than irredeemably irritating. It’s a gimmick founded on the assumption—no doubt correct!—that the audience’s compassion for the hearing-denied will overrule or belabor into submission its instinct that theater is artificial enough without the cast members either frantically echoing their own lines in sign language or, in the case of the deaf performers, being trailed around by spectral doppelgängers who speak their parts for them while
