Teen machine

RADICAL SHEIK The alt-rocker learns new tricks for theater.

A teenage boy is reprimanded for circulating sexual material in both versions of Spring Awakening: Frank Wedekind’s controversial coming-of-age play, and Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater’s musical adaptation of it. Each is set in late-19th-century Germany, but in the latter, when the boy starts to sing, the score propels him into the present day. Moving to Bill T. Jones’s choreography, the company breaks into an angst-filled rocking number called “Totally Fucked,” with lyrics such as “Yeah you’re fucked all right, and all for spite / You can kiss your sorry ass goodbye.…” Rodgers and Hammerstein it ain’t.

Singer-songwriter Sheik, who this year released his fifth album, White Limousine, and Sater, his lyricist-cum-book-writer collaborator, have penned a show as radical and dark as the 1891 original, although for different reasons. Wedekind frankly depicted teens tumbling into adulthood, coping with love, sex, pregnancy and depression. Sheik and Sater’s work, the first musical for Off Broadway’s 20-year-old Atlantic Theater, encompasses the same themes but also morphs from period piece to rock concert as scenes segue into songs and actors in period dress whip out microphones. (Sofia Coppola works a similarly anachronistic trick with her pop-accompanied historical flick, Marie Antoinette, out in October.) Sheik wanted the score to be able to stand outside of the play—a philosophy reminiscent of the days when show tunes were pop hits—and didn’t want his work to sound dated.

“Music, to me, communicates emotion, and using music of [Wedekind’s] era is not going to communicate the same emotion to a contemporary young person,” says the Grammy-nominated musician, who earned a fanbase from his 1996 eponymous debut album with its hit single, “Barely Breathing.” The challenge, he explains, “is to make sure that a 25-year-old person who listens to Coldplay or Keane can walk into the theater, really get behind the music and not feel like they have to adjust their aesthetic because they’re watching musical theater.”

As he curled up in a leather chair and sipped tea in his Tribeca loft just before the Memorial Day weekend, Sheik, 36, wasn’t aware of the holiday because he’s been so ensconced in previews and rewrites, not to mention June concert dates. He spoke of the seven years it’s taken to get Spring Awakening produced, his admiration for the current Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd, and his partnership with Sater, whom he met through a Buddhist organization.

They became writing partners when Sater asked Sheik to compose music for a song in one of his plays. Since then, Sater has contributed lyrics to Sheik’s Phantom Moon album; Sheik wrote music for Sater’s Nero (Another Golden Rome), which recently played San Francisco’s Magic Theatre; and they’re working on a musical based on “The Nightingale,” a short story by Hans Christian Andersen. “Duncan is kind of a nightingale—that haunted bird that sings through the night and has such humanity,” Sater muses. “Our partnership has become one of the most remarkable and rewarding parts of my life.”

Still, having worked solo for so long, Sheik had to adapt to the teamwork approach theater demands. “Initially I was very bratty and maybe a bit impolite in wanting things to be a certain way,” he says. “I had to learn that all this stuff is a negotiation.” One challenge involved varying song tempos. Sheik’s smooth melodies are often as low-key as his disposition. “My body clock is always 10 bpms slower than [director] Michael Mayer’s. When I’m playing guitar, Michael thinks everything is too slow. Then when I’m not in the room and I come back, I wonder why it’s so fast.” The string-heavy band includes bass, cello and guitar as well as drums and a piano played by various cast members.

But theater has had a positive impact on his solo work. Writing for more than one voice, for example, has led Sheik to use multiple vocal parts in his own music. “That’s just one of the nice side effects,” he says. “Your palette becomes richer and it broadens your own sense of what can happen in any given song at any given moment.”

Spring Awakening is at the Atlantic Theater Company through July 9. See Off Broadway.