The masses know him from his successful pop music, including the 1996 hit "Barely Breathing," which remained on the Billboard Hot 100 for a record-setting 55 straight weeks. Musical theatre fans know Duncan Sheik as the Tony and Grammy Award-winning composer for the smash Broadway hit SPRING AWAKENING, which debuted a little more than two years ago to rave reviews. With his newly released CD Whisper House, Sheik continues to please fans and enjoy success with a multitude of passionate projects. Still, what is one thing Sheik would like to do? “Choreography,” he joked in a recent interview while near the end of his nationwide tour.

Accompanying Sheik on tour were up-and-coming singer/songwriter Holly Brook and original SPRING AWAKENING cast member Lauren Pritchard, giving the show a feel of past, present and future. “Between the three of us we could kind of more or less do all the vocal parts for SPRING AWAKENING. It’s actually really fun for me because I don’t have to be up there singing straight for 90 minutes and I get to be kind of the band leader.” Sheik said. “There’s a lot of different colors going on in the show, much more than I’ve had before where you have brass and woodwinds and bow strings and three different voices in the rock band. It’s really the most fun I've had touring.”

Growing up dabbling in musical theatre, Sheik hit high school and immediately picked up the guitar. “For me the guitar was just a lot cooler," he laughed. A graduate of Brown University, Sheik enjoyed attending theatre performances while living in New York after graduation and began attending musicals with SPRING AWAKENING author-lyricist Steven Sater.

“When I met Steven and we started talking about SPRING AWAKENING, it was all kind of somewhat new territory for us,” Sheik shared. The pair felt much of the music featured in Broadway shows was drastically different from the music of today’s society. “Stylistically it felt disconnected from the larger culture,” he said. This belief and Sheik and Sater’s lack of experience in musical theatre helped to fuel the music premise behind SPRING AWAKENING.

“For me, it was ‘what if we had this amazing story, great actors, incredible production, lights and costumes and amazing sets? Then what if the music was like the music people connect to when they go buy a CD at the Virgin Record store or when listening to the radio or listening to their iPod? What if the music was the music of the contemporary young people? That was kind of the light bulb moment,’” Sheik said.

Songs from Sheik's latest CD, Whisper House, will be music for an upcoming musical set in the post-World War II era telling the story of a boy sent to live with his aunt in a haunted lighthouse. Originally recording the songs as demos for the musical, Sheik's manager and Sony Music executives encouraged him to release the tracks as a CD.

"I have this feeling that what you hear on the CD will be very representative of the first production of the piece,” Sheik said. Approached by actor/director Keith Powell, best known for his role on television comedy “30 Rock”, the two then joined forces with Kyle Jarrow, who wrote the story. The three held a brief workshop at New York University in 2007 and took a trip in early January of 2008 to Charleston, South Carolina, to continue working on the songs and production for the musical. “It was a compressed period of time where we got a lot done and there were no distractions and I think I am going to work from now on,” Sheik said.

And even though it's a musical, Whisper House is not SPRING AWAKENING.

“The pieces are kind of apples and oranges. I think perhaps it [Whisper House] is much more minimalist and in a way certainly more modest than something like SPRING AWAKENING, which ended up being fairly big and outrageous. Anyways, it’s been a lot of fun working with it,” Sheik said.

Sheik must be happily bitten by the Broadway bug, as he and Sater are currently collaborating on two upcoming musicals: The Nightingale and Nero, with Nero most likely appear on the London stage first. Another exciting project in the works for Sheik is a CD of 80s English cover music.

Sheik recalled friends and colleagues leaving early workshops of SPRING AWAKENING thinking he was crazy. He never imagined the show would ever appear on Broadway, until the very end of the production process, much less achieve it's current fame.

“When I find things that are exciting to me and are unique and different and perhaps strange and not the most conventional, those are the things that stand the test of time and work,” Sheik said.

By: Allison Thomas