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Interview: Duncan Sheik

Spring Awakening changed your life in a big way.
After my first record came out, I made four other albums, and I kept feeling they were not reaching the audience that I was hoping they would reach. There were moments where I felt: can I continue doing this over and over again? It felt like this Sisyphean task. And then when Spring Awakening happened, it was such a relief. Whether people liked it or not, it was part of the cultural argument. There was something that people could discuss, get angry about, get excited about. That’s huge. It also it helped me realize I really do enjoy writing music that exists alongside or within a narrative.

Frank Wedekind wrote Spring Awakening in 1891 and set it in Germany in that time period.
It was written as a piece of contemporary theater, a critique of bourgeois, repressed Lutheran morality.

This production keeps that play’s setting, but songs like “The Bitch of Living” are, of course, contemporary. There’s a lot to do with adult repression and frustrated teen sexuality. Teen angst: a bitch in 1891, a bitch in 2009.
[Laughs] That’s exactly the impetus for doing it today. The quality of the emotion remains the same even though they’re dressed up in different ways.

The play is both edgy and mainstream.
There are things in there that are racy, and it’s nice to push people’s buttons. But if you watch MTV at 4:30 in the afternoon, it’s way more prurient than Spring Awakening. Sexuality is a huge component of the human condition. You can treat it in an elegant way, in a painful way. I think [director] Michael Meyer did a very good job of rendering that aspect and made it, frankly, entertaining. People say a lot about how dark and depressing Spring Awakening is — and there is a tragic aspect to it — but there’s also so much that’s funny and joyful.

Editor's Note: In a previous version of this article, the play Spring Awakening was said to be starting its run at the Colonial Theatre beginning this Friday, April 24. The correct start date is April 28, and runs until May 24. The correction has been made above.