Duncan Sheik, Tony- and Grammy-winning ‘Spring Awakening’ composer and pop star, dies at 56

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Duncan Sheik, the Tony- and Grammy-winning singer-songwriter who crafted the music for “Spring Awakening,” has died. He was 56.

Sheik died Thursday from organ failure, his mother Suzanne Sheik told The New York Times. The Associated Press emailed his representatives for comment.

Sheik had been best known for his lasting radio hit “Barely Breathing” when he turned his sights on Broadway with “Spring Awakening,” resulting in the envelope-pushing show that musicalized teenage angst.

“With the exception of our director, we are all kind of Broadway outsiders. We wanted to shake things up a bit. And we just set out to make this really cool piece of theater,” Sheik told The Associated Press in 2007, as the show swept Tony nominations.

Sheik also tackled musicals based on “American Psycho” and “Alice in Wonderland,” and “Barely Breathing” spent 55 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No. 16. But he was probably best known for “Spring Awakening,” which ran for over 860 performances on Broadway starting in 2006.

The musical — adapted from a 19th-century play by German playwright Frank Wedekind, with music by Sheik and lyrics by playwright Steven Sater — is frank in its portrayals of incest, abortion and suicide. It’s intended partly as a warning that teens need good information about sex to avoid tragic mistakes.

“I don’t mean to be disrespectful to more traditional theater composers,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2015. “I love Stephen Sondheim. But it’s my mission to make sure that the theater is paying attention to what the rest of the world is listening to.”

Sheik and Sater were practicing Buddhists who met while chanting. They were collaborating on Sheik’s third album, “Phantom Moon,” when Sater mentioned he was working on a new production. Neither had ever written a musical before.

“I said to Steven, ‘I’m happy to do this musical, but I only want to do it if the music in the play is the kind that I and my peers can get behind stylistically and relate to and enjoy,’” Sheik recalled to the AP in 2006.

They made a pact: They’d retain the provincial, 19th-century Germany setting but with, as Sater put it, “the characters breaking into pop-contemporary when they sing.”

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“Spring Awakening” won eight Tony Awards, including for best musical, as well as the Grammy for best musical show album.

“Sheik’s music, spare in its simple orchestrations, lush in the lapping reach of its seductive choruses, embodies the shadowy air of longing that infuses the show, the excitement shading into fear, the joy that comes with a chaser of despair,” The New York Times said in its review.

The show is beloved in the musical theater community for breaking ground in terms of staging and content, alongside the likes of “Rent” and “Hamilton.” It returned to Broadway in 2015 in a well-received production by Deaf West Theatre. An off-Broadway version is slated to open this fall.

The cast of the original show was loaded with breakthrough actors like Jonathan Groff, Lea Michele, Lilli Cooper, Jennifer Damiano, Gideon Glick, John Gallagher Jr., Lauren Pritchard and Krysta Rodriguez, who have each gone on to fame in TV, film and stage. Groff would go on to earn a Tony with “Merrily We Roll Along,” and Michele became a superstar with “Glee.”

Sheik next channeled the music he heard getting past the velvet ropes of trendy, late-1980s Manhattan clubs for a Broadway adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel “American Psycho.”

The 1991 novel — later made into a 2000 movie starring Christian Bale — chronicles a homicidal New York yuppie named Patrick Bateman who is obsessed with high-end clothes and beauty products even as he slashes his way through Manhattan. Sheik, who also supplied lyrics, recalled only getting halfway through the book before throwing it across the room as a Brown University student.

For one standout song, “You Are What You Wear,” he reached out to old girlfriends to ask a question: What were you really into wearing in the late ’80s? He put the answers in the tune about high fashion: “Chanel, Gaultier, or Giorgio Armani/Moschino, Alaïa, or Norma Kamali/Should I rock/The Betsey Johnson/Or stick with classic/Comme des Garçons?”

“Duncan is really a genius and an intellectual and brings something both uniquely his but importantly of this period to the stage,” producer Jesse Singer told the AP at the time.

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Because Bateman, played onstage by Benjamin Walker, fancies himself a bit of a music critic — spewing mostly inane ruminations about Phil Collins and Huey Lewis and the News — Sheik also peppered his score with sly reworkings of “In the Air Tonight” and “Hip to Be Square.”

“There’s definitely an art to be able to write a song that on one level is a pop song and one that also has to tell a story and keep an audience engaged in terms of a larger narrative arc,” Sheik told the AP in 2013. “When you’re writing a song for the theater, it has to accomplish all this other stuff. It has to work in tandem with all these other agendas and creative impulses.”

The show, directed by Rupert Goold and with a story by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, made its premiere in 2013 in London. On Broadway in 2016, it bombed, lasting less than 90 performances.

“We were all sort of worried that it might be too violent for people and it might seem too misogynist,” Sheik told the AP on the eve of the opening. “But, in fact, the truth is this piece is a critique of a certain way of thinking about things. So in truth it’s better to go all-in.”

Growing up between South Carolina and New Jersey, Sheik learned guitar as a child and got his first synthesizer when he was 12. He was heavily influenced by Talk Talk, David Sylvian and Nick Drake. His self-titled debut album was released in 1996 and Rolling Stone gave it a four-star review, calling it “a defiant debut — beautiful and benevolent of spirit.”

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“Barely Breathing,” from that album, was nominated for best pop vocal performance in 1998 and would be kept alive on TV shows like “Glee” and “Girls.”

Other projects include “Whisper House,” an album and musical — a ghost story that ran in 2010 at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego — and “Legerdemain,” an album that explored the tension between art and commerce. His most recent album was 2022’s “Claptrap.”

But for someone who had once been a total stranger to Broadway, he told AP in 2016 that he had a sense of mission.

“I feel like it’s become my project to kind of drag different people who might not normally go to musical theater pieces to come see a piece of musical theater,” he said.

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曾获托尼奖和格莱美奖的创作型歌手邓肯·谢克去世，享年56岁。他曾为音乐剧《春之觉醒》谱曲。

据《纽约时报》报道，谢赫的母亲苏珊娜·谢赫透露，谢赫于周四因器官衰竭去世。美联社已向其代表发送邮件寻求置评。

谢克最出名的是他经久不衰的电台热门歌曲《勉强呼吸》，之后他将目光转向百老汇，推出了《春之觉醒》，这部突破常规的剧目将青少年焦虑音乐化了。

“除了导演之外，我们都是百老汇的局外人。我们想做出一些改变。我们只是想创作一部非常酷的戏剧作品，”谢克在2007年接受美联社采访时说道，当时该剧横扫了托尼奖提名。

谢克还创作了根据《美国精神病人》和《爱丽丝梦游仙境》改编的音乐剧，《勉强呼吸》在公告牌百强单曲榜上停留了55周，最高排名第16位。但他最著名的作品可能是《春之觉醒》，该剧从2006年开始在百老汇上演，演出超过860场。

这部音乐剧改编自德国剧作家弗兰克·韦德金德的19世纪戏剧，由谢赫作曲，史蒂文·萨特作词，坦率地描绘了乱伦、堕胎和自杀等话题。其部分目的在于警示青少年，他们需要正确的性知识来避免悲剧性的错误。

“我无意冒犯那些更传统的戏剧作曲家，”他在2015年接受《洛杉矶时报》采访时说道。“我热爱斯蒂芬·桑德海姆。但我的使命是确保戏剧界关注世界其他地方正在聆听的音乐。”

谢克和萨特都是虔诚的佛教徒，两人在诵经时相识。他们当时正在合作制作谢克的第三张专辑《幻影之月》，萨特提到他正在创作一部新的音乐剧。此前，两人都从未创作过音乐剧。

“我对史蒂文说，‘我很乐意出演这部音乐剧，但我只想在剧中的音乐风格是我和我的同龄人能够接受、产生共鸣并享受的那种情况下才出演，’”谢克在 2006 年接受美联社采访时回忆道。

他们达成了一个协议：他们将保留 19 世纪德国的乡村背景，但正如萨特所说，“当角色们唱歌时，他们会唱流行当代歌曲”。

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《春之觉醒》荣获八项托尼奖，其中包括最佳音乐剧奖，以及格莱美最佳音乐剧专辑奖。

《纽约时报》在其评论中写道：“谢赫的音乐，配器简洁，合唱部分充满诱惑力，体现了贯穿全剧的渴望的阴影，兴奋逐渐转变为恐惧，绝望之后又迎来喜悦。”

该剧因其在舞台呈现和内容上的创新而备受音乐剧界的喜爱，与《吉屋出租》（Rent）和《汉密尔顿》（Hamilton）等作品齐名。2015年，聋人剧院（Deaf West Theatre）以广受好评的制作将其带回百老汇。外百老汇版本预计将于今年秋季开演。

原版剧集的演员阵容星光熠熠，包括乔纳森·格罗夫、丽娅·米歇尔、莉莉·库珀、詹妮弗·达米亚诺、吉迪恩·格里克、约翰·加拉赫、劳伦·普里查德和克丽丝塔·罗德里格斯等，他们后来都在电视、电影和舞台剧领域取得了巨大成功。格罗夫凭借《欢乐岁月》（Merrily We Roll Along）荣获托尼奖，而米歇尔则凭借《欢乐合唱团》（Glee）成为超级巨星。

接下来，谢克将他在 20 世纪 80 年代末曼哈顿时尚俱乐部的天鹅绒绳外听到的音乐融入到百老汇改编的布雷特·伊斯顿·埃利斯的小说《美国精神病人》中。

这部1991年的小说——后来于2000年被改编成电影，由克里斯蒂安·贝尔主演——讲述了一个名叫帕特里克·贝特曼的纽约雅皮士杀人狂的故事。他痴迷于高档服装和美容产品，却在曼哈顿街头肆意杀戮。谢克也为这部小说创作了歌词，他回忆说，自己还是布朗大学的学生时，只读了一半就把书扔到了房间的另一边。

在一首特别的歌曲《You Are What You Wear》中，他联系了以前的女友们，问她们一个问题：你们在80年代末期真正喜欢穿什么？他把答案写进了这首关于高级时装的歌里：“香奈儿、高缇耶还是乔治·阿玛尼/莫斯奇诺、阿拉亚还是诺玛·卡玛利/我应该穿/贝齐·约翰逊/还是坚持经典的/川久保玲？”

“邓肯真是一位天才和知识分子，他将自己独特的风格以及这个时代的重要元素带到了舞台上，”制片人杰西·辛格当时告诉美联社。

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由于本杰明·沃克在舞台上扮演的贝特曼自诩为音乐评论家——他经常发表一些关于菲尔·柯林斯和休伊·刘易斯与新闻乐队的愚蠢评论——谢克还在他的配乐中巧妙地加入了对《今夜在空中》和《方正时尚》的改编。

“创作一首既是流行歌曲，又能讲述故事，并能围绕一个更大的叙事弧线吸引观众的歌曲，这绝对是一门艺术，”谢赫在2013年接受美联社采访时说道。“当你为剧院创作歌曲时，它必须完成所有这些其他的事情。它必须与所有这些其他目标和创作冲动协同运作。”

该剧由鲁伯特·古尔德执导，罗伯托·阿吉雷-萨卡萨编剧，于2013年在伦敦首演。2016年登陆百老汇后，却遭遇惨败，演出不足90场。

“我们都有些担心这件作品对某些人来说可能太暴力，也可能显得太厌女，”谢赫在开幕前夕告诉美联社。“但事实上，这件作品是对某种思维方式的批判。所以，说实话，全力以赴才是最好的选择。”

谢伊克在南卡罗来纳州和新泽西州长大，从小学习吉他，12岁时拥有了他的第一台合成器。他深受Talk Talk、大卫·西尔维安和尼克·德雷克的影响。他的首张同名专辑于1996年发行，《滚石》杂志给予了四星好评，称其为“一张充满反叛精神的处女作——优美而富有善意”。

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专辑中的歌曲《Barely Breathing》在 1998 年获得最佳流行演唱奖提名，并在《欢乐合唱团》和《女孩》等电视节目中广为流传。

其他作品包括专辑兼音乐剧《低语之屋》（Whisper House），这是一部鬼故事剧，于2010年在圣地亚哥老环球剧院上演；以及专辑《魔术》（Legerdemain），该专辑探讨了艺术与商业之间的张力。他最近的一张专辑是2022年的《喧闹》（Claptrap）。

但对于一个曾经对百老汇一无所知的人来说，他在 2016 年告诉美联社，他有一种使命感。

他说：“我觉得我的目标就是吸引那些平时可能不会去看音乐剧的人来观看音乐剧。”