“We got spanked.”
In June of 2016, Duncan Sheik was painfully aware of the fresh welts left on his pride by Broadway. The composer and singer-songwriter best known for his ‘90s hit “Barely Breathing” had just received notice that American Psycho, his new musical based on Bret Easton Ellis’s serial-killer allegory, would close after just 81 performances. In other words, a total flop. A cool $8.8 million down the toilet.
“The people who didn’t like the show… it was the Tony Award nominating committee and the New York critics, specifically. Outside of New York, people really loved it,” Sheik told Ellis on his podcast that same month. The “spankings,” in the form of a paltry two Tony nominations and milquetoast reviews like the one from Ben Brantley, who called the musical “a mess,” were dished out by “people who were really invested in traditional musical theater,” in Sheik’s estimation. That is, in people who yearned for the perfect rhymes and swelling orchestras of golden-age musicals, not people who were interested in shepherding the art form into the modern era along with the rest of culture.
So, Sheik decamped to off-Broadway. That’s where Spring Awakening, his smash hit with collaborator Steven Sater, had begun in 2006 — a rung of the theater landscape with lower costs, cheaper tickets and more adventurous audiences. But not, unfortunately for Sheik, more adventurous critics.
When his next show with Sater, Alice by Heart, a riff on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, opened in February 2019 as the inaugural production at MCC’s 245-seat Newman Mills Theater in Hell’s Kitchen, Brantley of The New York Times went further than “a mess,” calling the show “impossible to embrace as a credible work of entertainment.” The musical — which, based on word of mouth (if not PR-approved talking points), was hoping for a Broadway transfer — never made it to the Great White Way. Neither has any musical by Sheik since American Psycho closed over a decade ago.
Duncan Sheik died on Sept. 17 at the age of 56; the cause was cardiac arrest. Many obituaries and remembrances that have been published since his untimely passing have revolved around the idea that, after his early pop stardom, he helped push the Broadway musical into the 21st century. This isn’t a rose-colored view of his impact, overstated due to recent tragedy — instead, it’s a sentiment that eagle-eyed cultural critics understood even before Spring Awakening ripped apart the seams of this buttoned-up scene. (Even the Gray Lady is finally catching up to his sonic brilliance.) Yet, the final gift from Sheik, the pied piper of Millennial and Gen Z theatergoers, is being opened outside the confines of the 41 theaters that make up Broadway.
Off-Broadway theaters have been struggling in recent years. Just like the $20 million Broadway spectacles have been struggling. Just like theaters all across the U.S. (If you didn’t know it before, New York theater giant Oskar Eustis made sure the final nail in the coffin rang out loud and clear: “I think the American nonprofit theater movement is over.”) Blame rising costs, aging audiences, fewer subscribers and stingier philanthropists, to name a few major factors.
But in the wake of his death, Sheik’s work is poised to inject a triple dose of adrenaline into the off-Broadway realm — that more accessible, more adventurous home he gravitated toward throughout his career.
On Friday, Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen begins performances at The Night Egg at the Culture Club, a new 300-seat immersive theater at the former McKittrick Hotel, the longtime home of Sleep No More. The musical, with music and lyrics by Sheik, is based on Moyoco Anno’s manga series that follows a 20th-century Parisian prostitute who chronicles the inner yearnings of her clients. The day after Thanksgiving, a reconceived production of Spring Awakening, led by director Danya Taymor (John Proctor Is the Villain, The Outsiders, niece of Julie Taymor), will descend on Studio Seaview after a highly TikToked open casting call this summer.
Then, next year, if we’re lucky, Sheik’s biggest contribution to the off-Broadway landscape will touch down in Bushwick, Brooklyn: a radically rethought production of American Psycho at a brand-new venue called The Empyrean Club. The venture was announced back in March, but when I checked in this week with the musical’s director Max Hunter, who is also a managing partner in The Empyrean, he said the “estimated opening window (for both venue and production) is winter 2027.”
“Duncan and I had many thrilling conversations about how this production can reframe the storytelling within the context of an entirely new, intimate, decadent theatrical space outside Midtown Manhattan,” Hunter told me. “Duncan’s music is the heartbeat at the center of this theatrical adaptation.”
“His loss is immense,” he added.
There’s no question about that. But Sheik’s posthumous impact — on the off-Broadway landscape, on the art of the musical, on the next generation of theatergoers and theatermakers — is shaping up to be immense, too. Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen is the first English-language American musical based on a manga; it will christen a new theatrical space, as will American Psycho; and Spring Awakening continues to speak to the youngest generations, even 20 years after its debut, as evidenced by the online and in-person fervor for the upcoming production.
If you had given up on the Broadway musical — too many IP plays, too few revelations from your red velvet seat — maybe what you’ve been waiting for is in a smaller, cozier theater off-Broadway. Maybe that’s where Sheik belonged all along.
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