The Broadway musical "Spring Awakening" definitely keeps you awake at the Hippodrome Theatre. This tale of young love has enough romance to tug at the heart, but it also is direct with the clinical details.

There's a contemporary edge to the treatment of the romantic material, which explains why this 2006 show won eight Tony Awards including best musical. What's striking about that current vibe is that the material itself is quite old.

Based on an 1891 play by Frank Wedekind that was considered shocking in its own day, "Spring Awakening" speaks to an era when the censorious shackles of Victorian society were being tested by playwrights and young adults alike. The theories of Sigmund Freud would be all the rage within a few years, as people became more open in all sorts of ways. The play has its share of dream analysis and, for that matter, dating analysis.

The musical's book and lyrics by Steven Sater pretty much adhere to the play's characters. Prudish authority figures and questioning adolescents are presented within the context of just how uptight most people would have been in a provincial German town in the 1890s.

As for the score by Duncan Sheik that's ardently performed by an on-stage band, it sounds closer to a punk rock band than to a Strauss waltz. This deliberately anachronistic, electric guitar-driven musical score is a pointed reminder of how "Spring Awakening" places the action in the 1890s and yet comments upon it in such a way as to remind us that the anxieties of teen life resonate through the ages.

It's surely no coincidence that the short, anger-suffused songs; the assortment of disaffected young characters; and the brick wall-backed, sparely appointed set design all bear some resemblance to the bohemian musical of our own time, "Rent." You can understand why young audiences in particular have taken to this show. Indeed, there is on-stage seating for some lucky audience members; some of these spectators were bouncing to the music much as they would at a rock concert.

The creative team has smartly packaged this old-yet-new show, with results that are always energetic and sometimes exhilarating. Although they also have a tendency to underscore obvious points, the didactic overkill is generally offset by the melodic content.

There's also some worrisome heavyness in some of the performances. Playing multiple roles including parents, teachers and other authority figures, Angela Reed in the female adult roles and Henry Stram in the male adult roles occasionally verge on being stage villain caricatures. The show's merited satiric jabs verge on cartoonish overstatement at times. Although this doesn't ruin the show, it does detract from the more genuinely heartbreaking moments.

The performers fortunately are much stronger in the student roles. Male and female student characters attend separate schools in this small village, which only heightens their curiosity about the opposite sex. Some of their frank private discussions reflect the social value system of that distant era, while other discussions reflect what it's like to be a teen-ager in any century.

One of the show's most astute touches is how smoothly it goes from scenes involving several principal characters to other scenes in which a group of teens brazenly serves notice that peer pressure is among the most powerful forces in nature.

At the heart of the play is a budding romance between a sensitive young man, Melchior (Kyle Riabko), and an equally sensitive young woman, Wendla (Christy Altomare). The third main character is Melchior's troubled friend, Moritz (Blake Bashoff), who is failing in school and perhaps in life itself.

These are fully realized characters whose angst is incisively conveyed by the punchy songs. The three actors really bring their anxiety-ridden roles alive. Bashoff is especially winning, because his spiked hair, pale skin and manic behavior make him seem like a rising punk rock star when he grabs a stage microphone and shouts about his miserable existence in songs that make 1891 sound like 2009.

'Spring Awakening'

When:Through Sunday, June 21

Where: Hippodrome Theatre, 12 N. Eutaw St., Baltimore.

Show times: Thursday and Friday, June 18 and 19, 8 p.m.; Saturday, June 20, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, June 21, 1:30 and 6:30 p.m.

Tickets: $22-$67. Call 410-547-SEAT or go to www.BroadwayAcrossAmerica.com.

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