It was a spring awakening for Broadway, for young theatergoers . . . and for Duncan Sheik.
“Spring Awakening,” a revolutionary musical written by Sheik and Steven Sater in response to the Columbine massacre, has galvanized young audiences like nothing since “Rent.” Sheik not only earned two 2007 Tony Awards and a Grammy nomination, he now has more musicals in development, is back on tour promoting his “White Limousine” CD and is forming a new band with touring mate David Poe.
It’s been a life-altering year for the pop star best known since 1996 for the hit “Barely Breathing.”
And Sheik, as well as audiences, have Buddhism to thank in part for it. Not only for helping Sheik and Sater to persevere through a difficult, eight-year development process, but for the founding principles of a lifesaving musical that gives voice to roiling teenage angst in an innovative way. It adapts Frank Wedekind’s controversial 1891 play about German teens fearfully experiencing their sexual awakenings in a complete absence of information — and setting it to a modern rock score.
If we’re lucky, Broadway will never be the same.
“Mainly there’s this huge feeling of relief that something you put so much into, and you struggled with so much and for so long, and frankly was so really painful to deal with at times . . . finally did reach this audience I was really hoping would get it — and they did,” said Sheik, who has three upcoming Colorado concerts in five days, interrupted by the Grammy Awards on Feb. 10.
“After so many years of making records and feeling like my music wasn’t reaching the audience I hoped it would, it was like, finally something works and has become part of the cultural argument.”
It was an argument that began with Columbine, which profoundly affected Sater. “Having young kids, I think Columbine was more of a visceral reality for Steven,” Sheik said. So he adapted “Spring Awakening,” and the first person he brought on board was Sheik to write songs like “The Bitch of Living.”
“It was like, ‘Here is this 100-year-old play that really does have huge relevance to the issues of what it is like to be an adolescent today,’ ” Sheik said, “and maybe we can find a way of doing it in a different way that will be a powerful lens through which to tell the story.”
Sater has said Columbine and “Spring Awakening” are both about kids whose inner cries no one could hear. “But the reason Steven really talks about Columbine is he wanted to foreground the fact that it’s not just about 1891; it’s about today,” Sheik said.
During the trying eight-year process leading to “Spring Awakening’s” Broadway debut in December 2006 and subsequent best-musical Tony Award, Sheik turned to many guiding Buddhist principles, such as transcending individual differences for a common goal. He also discovered the source play espouses the basic Buddhist tenet that recognizing the dark side of human nature is one of the first steps in overcoming it.
“The thing is, when you practice Buddhism, it does kind of infiltrate almost all aspects of your life,” Sheik said. “I am not the perfect Buddhist, that’s for sure, but when you are practicing correctly, it really gives you an incredible amount of creative energy, and it makes you a more compassionate person. I think you have more empathy, and you are more understanding about what other people are going through or suffering or feeling. And I think that’s the key to making art that speaks to people no matter what.”
Buddhists believe that in the course of a day, a person travels within 10 different life states ranging from hell to enlightenment and everything in between, such as anger, tranquility and realization.
“And I really believe that any piece of theater needs to express all these different life states in order for it to be really satisfying for an audience,” Sheik said.
“One of the things that’s frustrating to me about a lot of musical theater is the aspect that it’s a ‘light entertainment’ that doesn’t ever want to get too heavy or too dark. But for art to affect me, I feel you need to express the whole gamut of the human condition, from the darkest emotions to the most joyful ones.
“That was certainly what we attempted to do in ‘Spring Awakening,’ and when I sit in the audience, I feel like we pretty much succeeded.”
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
Duncan Sheik
Feb. 7 at Boulder’s Fox Theatre, $20-$25, 8 p.m., 303-443-3399.
Feb. 9 at Aspen’s Wheeler House, $30, 8 p.m., 866-449-0464.
Feb. 11 at Beaver Creek’s Vilar Arts Center, $36, 7:30 p.m., 888-920-2787.
David Poe opening. All ahows all ages.
