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...

 

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