Three loud cheers for the brilliant new musical Spring Awakening, which is enjoying its European premiere to packed houses at the Lyric Hammersmith after two years of US success. With its planned run already extended by two weeks (until March 14), and glowing reviews accumulating, it surely can’t be long before a West End transfer is announced.

This is a show about young people performed by young people — many giving impressive professional stage debuts – for enthusiastic audiences largely composed of young people. What does it matter that its setting is the Germany of more than a century ago as described in a little-performed classic play of the period? Forget High School Musical; this is the even better ‘German Gymnasium Musical’.

The preoccupations of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening – love, loss, a longing for a better, brighter future – are those that have helped define teen spirit since long before that phrase existed. They are, moreover, the perennial themes of pop music. So, as lyricist Steven Slater has said, what a great fit was suggested in the presentation of the story in tandem with a driving rock and pop score from Duncan Sheik.

Where I part company with Mr Slater is over his claim that the musical provides “a completely different take” on Wedekind’s characters. On the contrary, I was impressed at how faithful the show (still under its US director Michael Mayer) is to the action and spirit of the play, as I recall it from the National Theatre’s 1974 staging of the first uncut version in the UK and from last-summer’s well-executed revival by students at the Oxford Playhouse.

At its centre is the doomed love affair between the intelligent and sexually precocious Melchior (the charismatic Aneurin Barnard, pictured right) and Wendla (Charlotte Wakefield), a girl so innocent she believes the stork theory of baby delivery and is scarcely better informed when put in the picture (allegedly) by her mother (Sian Thomas, playing all the adult female roles).

It must be admitted that Melchior’s understanding of the facts of life, measured against the utter ignorance of his partner, makes him clearly the ‘guilty’ party in their coupling — a graphic, bare-bottomed affair, incidentally, that went down well with youngsters in the stalls around me.

Some adults, perhaps, might feel sympathy for the lad’s dad (the excellent Richard Cordery, in all adult male roles) when he sends him for corrective treatment after Wendla becomes pregnant. By then, to compound his felony, Melchior has been revealed as the author of a no-detail-spared sexual primer penned at the request of his pal Moritz (Iwan Rheon), a scallywag schoolboy whose Dennis the Menace hairstyle, I fancy, would not have been permitted for one minute among the primly parted scalpings of his classmates.

It is a neat touch from Sheik that this roguish figure is given punky, rhythm-driven numbers to sing with the on-stage band, rather than the tuneful ballads scored for the romantic leads, with viola and cello adding to their plangency.

Often sung to the background of spoken dialogue, the songs are at once listenable and to the point. Highlights include the anthemic final number The Song of Purple Summer, the classroom rocker The Bitch of Living, the show-stopping Totally F***ed – Melchior’s reaction to being fingered as the author of the sex manual – and Blue Wind, sung by the sexually exploited Ilse (Lucy Barker), a waif-like presence reminiscent of Ophelia.

Wittily, Melchior and Wendla’s love duet The Word of Your Body is reprised when the gleefully naughty Hanschen (Jamie Blackley) and Ernst (Harry McEntire) joyously sample the pleasures of gay love. This life-affirming event – amid the gloom attached to so much of the show’s sexual content – will bring a smile to everyone's face, as it definitely does to theirs.

Box office: call 0871 22 117 29 (www.lyric.co.uk).