a broadway composer gave two schoolboys a love song in 2006 and let them both live. duncan sheik died thursday at 56.
via Playbill, The Associated Press and The Boston Globe
There is a moment in the second act of Spring Awakening where two schoolboys kiss, and one of them says he loves the other, and then the show simply carries on. Nobody is beaten for it. Neither of them dies. In a musical where other children do die, and die badly, the two boys who find each other are allowed to walk out the other side.
That was 2006. Duncan Sheik wrote the music. He died on Thursday night at 56.
what his mother said
His mother, Suzanne Sheik, told the New York Times the cause was organ failure. The family had said on September 16 that he was hospitalized in critical but stable condition, and asked for privacy, and did not explain further. They still have not, and that is theirs to keep.
He was days away from the first performances of a new musical he had scored, Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen. "Duncan's music is at the heart of Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen," the production said, "and his extraordinary artistry, generosity, and spirit have left an indelible mark on all of us."
what spring awakening did
The straight version of this obituary, which the wires filed this morning and filed well, goes like this. A singer-songwriter had a radio hit in 1996 with Barely Breathing, which spent 55 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 and got him a Grammy nomination, and then he did something nobody expected and set a censored German play from 1891 to a rock score. Spring Awakening opened on Broadway in 2006, ran more than 860 performances and won eight Tony Awards including Best Musical. Playbill reports Sheik took two of them himself, Best Original Score with Steven Sater and Best Orchestrations. The cast album won a Grammy.
All true, and all of it leaves out why a particular kind of teenager still knows every track.
Because the other thing Spring Awakening did was hand a generation of theater kids a cast recording in which desire was not a problem to be solved. The show is about what happens to children when the adults refuse to tell them anything, and it is furious about it, and the fury is the point. But the specific mercy of it, the thing that lodged, was Hanschen and Ernst: a plot in which two boys want each other and the wanting is treated as ordinary and sweet rather than as a foreshadowing. Gideon Glick was 18 when he originated Ernst.
who walked out of that show
Look at the company it launched. Jonathan Groff, who has since won his own Tony for Merrily We Roll Along. Lea Michele, who went to Glee. Gideon Glick, John Gallagher Jr., Lilli Cooper, Jennifer Damiano, Lauren Pritchard, Krysta Rodriguez. An unreasonable number of the people who have shaped what Broadway sounds like for twenty years were standing on that stage as teenagers, holding handheld microphones, singing a score written by a man best known at the time for a song about not calling someone back.
He kept working. Alice By Heart, American Psycho, Because of Winn-Dixie, Noir. None of them landed the way the first one did, which is the ordinary fate of anyone who writes the thing that defines them early.
Playbill reports he is survived by his wife Nora, his daughter Ines, his parents and his half-siblings.
If you were sixteen in 2007 and you had that album on an iPod your parents had paid for, you already know what this one is. It is not that the show told you it would get better, because it pointedly does not say that. It is that somebody had written the kiss down, and scored it, and put it in front of a paying Broadway audience eight times a week, and none of it was an apology.
Fifty-six is no age at all.
