“Don’t Do Sadness/Blue Wind” is a song from the musical Spring Awakening by Duncan Sheik, based on the German play of the same title. Sheik’s Spring Awakening follows the story of a group of teenagers/young adults in late nineteenth century Germany as they question the rigid morals of the society they live in. Spring Awakening is a beautiful and brilliant piece of theater, and it has been among my favorite shows for years now.

“Don’t Do Sadness/Blue Wind” comes late in the play when Moritz grows tired of dealing with his depression and failure. Over the course of the play, we learn that Moritz is not doing as well in school as he’d like to, and consequently, he’s disappointing his family. Moritz desperately wants to leave all of these pressures behind and flee to America, but he can’t get the money to do so, despite his pleas to his best friend Melchior’s mother, Fanny. During the song “And Then There Were None,” we are presented with a letter that Moritz wrote to Fanny, explaining his situation and threatening to commit suicide if she could not provide him the money he desired to escape to America. Fanny offered her condolences to Moritz and provided him with alternate solutions to his frustrations, but this was not enough to console Moritz.

Moritz ultimately decides to take his own life, and “Don’t Do Sadness/Blue Wind” is the song Moritz sings before doing so. It opens with the lyrics “Awful sweet to be a little butterfly/Just swinging over things and nothing deep inside/Nothing going, going wild in you, you know/You’re slowing by the riverside, a-floating high and blue.” Though these opening lyrics are beautiful, they are heavily symbolic of Moritz’s apathy for life and the emptiness he is constantly plagued with. Later, in the chorus, Mortiz sings “I don’t do sadness/Not even a little bit/Just don’t need it in my life//…//I don’t do sadness/So been there/Don’t do sadness/Just don’t care.” The chorus is much more blatant than the verses, indicating that Moritz is fed up with the consistent feelings of sadness in his life. He no longer wants to be depressed, and he feels that the only way to escape his depression at this point is to take his own life.

While the song alone gives the audience great insight into the toiling inside of Mortiz’s head, it is not as meaningful and as easy to understand when it is separated from the performance. In the performance, you can see Moritz’s anger and frustration as he sings, and you are also exposed to dialogue not included in the song, so in addition to the link I provided to the OBC recording of the song, I’ve also included a recording of this scene, in which you see the brief fit of outrage and frustration Moritz experiences right before the song, and his ultimate decision to end his life following the song. Though listening to the song definitely makes me emotional, nothing compares to the chilling feeling I experience when I watch this performance. I remember when I saw the Deaf West Broadway revivial of Spring Awakening last December, I was in tears and I had goosebumps the entire time. The performance of this song is deep and beautifully chilling in its original form, but when performed with deaf actors and the incorporation of American Sign Language, there is even more beauty in the performance that really resonated with me. I can’t seem to put into words why I  found it to be so much more meaningful this way, so I thought I would include a video to provide some explanation. Sadly I couldn’t find a recording of the Deaf West performance of this song from one of the revival shows, but I was able to find a video of the actor who did Moritz’s vocals singing “Don’t Do Sadness/Blue Wind” with someone signing along in ASL.