Let me be honest. I don't get why so many people love the musical "Spring Awakening," which was originally produced on Broadway to almost universal acclaim in 2006. And people really do love it. That first production won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical (the score is by Duncan Sheik), and the cast album won a Grammy.

I myself find Steven Sater's book and lyrics to propel an irritating melodrama, where a group of teenagers in turn-of-the-century Germany are punished and shamed — again and again — for exploring their blooming sexuality.

Yet this production from Deaf West Theatre is transcendent. Hearing actors in short pants and antique dresses use American Sign Language while they sing. Deaf actors sign silently, but are shadowed by hearing musicians in contemporary dress, who sing out loud the thoughts trapped in their heads and hands. 

Director Michael Arden and Choreographer Spencer Lift spin the cast around the industrial, bi-level stage, but it is the way they've choreographed the sign language that is the real dance here. The youthful sorrow and confusion and lust and rage is literally written on the air. The cast transforms their words into flocks of birds seeking freedom with their hands, uses sign language to physically show how they are longing to burst out of the repressive social restrictions that trap them. 

A standout is Treshelle Edmond, who plays Martha, a young woman who reveals that she is being raped by her father. Her signing and acting inform each other — her words seem to spill directly from the core of her body in waves of grief, anger and vulnerability.

"Spring Awakening" is primarily about carnality and what happens when its importance is diminished or oppressed. Deaf West has taken this idea and grounded it in a robust physicality that makes the musical — even this signed version — sing.