By Liz Turner
Contributing Writer
If you grew up in the 1990’s, you may remember hearing Duncan Sheik’s “Barely Breathing” as it soared to the top of the charts. But since that foray into mainstream success, Duncan Sheik has now taken his music and imagination to an entirely different genre: musical theater. Over a period of eight years, Duncan Sheik worked with acclaimed director Steven Sater on writing a rock musical based on the controversial German play Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind.
Spring Awakening opened on Broadway in December of 2006, and soon achieved popular success, particularly among young musical theater fans. Sheik won two Tony awards for Best Orchestrations and Best Original score, and a third award also went to the cast of Spring Awakening for Best Musical. A year later, Sheik also won a Grammy award for Best Musical Show album. After playing 888 performances to sold-out audiences on Broadway, Spring Awakening closed on January 18th, 2009. I had the great opportunity to meet up with Sheik last week while he was in town and ask him what he has been up to since Spring Awakening closed.
Duncan Sheik was at the Berklee Performance Center on March 13 performing songs off of his new album Whisper House, Spring Awakening as well as his own solo material. Whisper House is a new musical that Sheik and playwright Kyle Jarrow have been working on about a young boy whose father dies in World War II, and then goes to live with his aunt in a haunted lighthouse in New England. Ghosts of the lighthouse (played by the musicians of the show) appear and are the embodiments of all of the young boy’s fears and desires.
Joining Duncan Sheik on his tour are original Spring Awakening cast member Lauren Pritchard and promising singer-songwriter Holly Brook. The band members consist of Duncan on vocals and guitar, Gerry Leonard on guitar, Louis Schwadron on French horn, Lauren Pritchard and Holly Brook singing and playing keys, and cello, clarinet, bass and drums. The instrumentation brings unique sounds to Sheik’s compositions, which span a range of genres including pop, rock, folk, and classical. I asked Sheik if there are any plans for Whisper House to become a staged musical and he said that they are working on a small, intimate production of Whisper House to debut in San Diego sometime in January of 2010.
Throughout his career, Sheik has tried to stay true to himself. “I wasn’t going to go off and try to be Steven Sondheim,” he said. “It wouldn’t be authentic, and I wanted to write music for young people in the contemporary world, to do theater where the music was relevant to a wider culture.”
With the current economic hardships and many shows unable to afford to stay open on Broadway I asked Sheik what he currently thought of Broadway. “Broadway is going to be just fine” he replied. “ It doesn’t matter what the economy is doing. In fact when the economy goes bad is when people start going to the movies and theater a lot more, they want to be taken away from their troubles for a few hours.”
Duncan Sheik grew up listening to a wide variety of artists ranging from Mark Hollis of Talk Talk, Bjork, Radiohead, Peter Gabriel, Genesis, The Cure, Yes, Nick Drake, and John Martin. He also reminisced about seeing David Sylvian of the indie band, Japan at the Berklee Performance Center, when he was at the boarding school, Phillips Andover, just 25 miles north of Boston.
Duncan Sheik ended our interview with some advice to aspiring musicians. “It’s not usually a great thing to try and second guess what other people are going to like and want to listen to. Just because something is a commercial success, it doesn’t mean you should follow, imitate, or re-create that exact path. Music is always made best when someone has a unique and different point of view.” “I’ve also found in my own process whenever I’ve tried to do things for more commercial reasons, they have been very disappointing, and then when I’ve done things for purely artistic reasons, the irony is that those are the things other people seem to like much more.”
He also confirmed for us that the rumors are true: Spring Awakening will be made into a motion picture sometime in the near future. Spring Awakening has just opened up in Vienna and also in the West End of London. It will also be making its way to Boston as part of its North American National Tour. Spring Awakening will be playing at Boston’s Colonial Theater April 28 to May 24 2009. For student rush tickets visit the box office one hour before the show with your student ID, to receive a ticket for $25 or visit broadwayacrossamerica.com for more details.
