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Duncan Sheik, who soared to stardom in the 1990s with his smash hit "Barely Breathing" before becoming a decorated composer on Broadway, has died. He was 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 night, according to a post on his Instagram page. His mother, Suzanne Sheik, told The New York Times that the cause was organ failure.
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“The world has lost a singular talent, and deeply influential voice in music and theater,” the post reads. “His musical legacy will continue to inspire generations to come.”
Sheik was best known for his enduring radio hit “Barely Breathing” when he turned his sights to 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.
‘Spring Awakening’ revolutionized Broadway musicals
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.”
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 staging and content, alongside shows like 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 blended musical theater with pop music
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.
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, premiered in London in 2013. 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.”
‘Barely Breathing’ was nominated for a Grammy
Growing up between South Carolina and New Jersey, Sheik learned guitar as a child and got his first synthesizer at 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.”
Sheik’s self-titled debut album was released in 1996. A year later, powered by the success of his huge hit “Barely Breathing,” he was playing high-profile gigs such as this appearance on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.”
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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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