Theater News

Duncan Sheik Builds a Dream House
Plus: Luba Mason Goes Krazy.

The Tony Award-winning composer of Spring Awakening and the star of Jekyll & Hyde take new directions for their latest CDs.

Duncan Sheik
(© Joseph Marzullo/WENN)
Duncan Sheik
(© Joseph Marzullo/WENN)

One can hardly tell from the cover of Duncan Sheik’s Whisper House (Sony BMG) that it is really a CD of show tunes — albeit a show that hasn’t been produced yet. But the genesis and creation of Whisper House is a far cry from the creation of Sheik’s Tony Award-winning triumph Spring Awakening.

“About three years ago, my friend Keith Powell, who’s an actor and director, asked me if I wanted to do the music for a piece of theater, and I said ‘that sounds great, could you be a little more vague,'” laughs Sheik. “About a year later, he said he wanted to do something about ghosts and lighthouses, and then he hired the playwright Kyle Jarrow to write a script, and they put on a workshop in 2007. And I still hadn’t written a single note of music. So last year, we all decided to go to Charleston for about 10 days to write the score, which basically meant that we would sit around on the deck of this house, drink, and think of even more ways to break the rules of musical theater.”

Indeed, Whisper House is hardly a conventional musical; it takes places in the head of lead character Christopher, but all the singing is done by the ghosts who Christopher sees. “One of my early silly ideas was that all the lyrics would literally be from Kyle’s text and taken from previous scenes in the play, but that proved to be an impossible task,” says Sheik. “But it did help us to figure out that what the ghosts sing about are Christopher’s internal fears.”

Going to Charleston proved useful on numerous levels for the writing team. “South Carolina is rich in ghost lore, and we even went on a ghost tour in the city, which directly influenced one of the songs, ‘The Tale of Solomon Snell,'” says Sheik. “But I also realized after the fact that when I was growing up in Hilton Head, one of the cool things we used to do is go camping on one of the nearby islands and one of the dads would always try to tell us these spooky ghost stories.”

Sheik will be performing some songs from the album at Barnes & Noble Lincoln Triangle on Friday, January 30 — and then take a few days to go to London for the UK premiere of Spring Awakening before beginning a six-week, multi-city tour in Charleston on February 8, where he’ll be joined by Holly Brook, who sings the female parts on Whisper House, and original Spring Awakening star Lauren Pritchard. “It will be a virtual variety show,” he says. “This kind of touring is very similar to what I’ve done since 1995, so I am kind of used it. Of course, it has its ups and downs, but it’s great during the show if everything’s firing on all cylinders. Still, it takes a lot out of you, and at my age, six weeks on the road is plenty.”

********************************************************

Conversely, there’s not a show tune to be found on Luba Mason’s Krazy Love (Sunnyside Records), despite the performer’s track record in such Broadway shows as Jekyll & Hyde and Chicago. Instead, the CD focuses on Brazilian-themed music, with eight of the ten tracks written or co-written by Mason. That, however, was not the singer’s original plan.

“I knew I wanted to do a CD with Brazilian-based influences, and I had picked out a whole bunch of covers,” she says. “Then I met this amazing pianist, Renato Neto, and we even rehearsed those songs, and I realized I wasn’t happy; it just wasn’t that interesting. So Renato asked me if I wrote songs, and I said no. But I remembered about 10 years ago, I had started one, so I brought it in and played it for him on the piano — I was so nervous — and he stood there and then said ‘play it again.’ And by the end of the session, we had finished the music, and I wrote the rest of the words that night, and the album evolved from there.”

Mason found that giving herself some daily structure was the key to her songwriting. “I found I was freshest first thing in the morning — once you start dealing with the stuff of daily life, it’s easy to get distracted. So I would sit in this one chaise in our house by the window, and just let things come into my head, whether it was for an hour or five hours.”

While one might imagine that Mason’s celebrated husband, singer-songwriter Ruben Blades, was instrumental in the creation of the CD, the reality is just the opposite. “He lives in Panama, where he’s Minister of Tourism, so he had nothing to do with this,” she notes. “He never even heard it until it was mastered, and we were visiting New York. And I wanted it that way. It’s not just that I wanted it to be my own, but I admire him so much that I take everything he says so seriously. I was so happy that he flipped the first time he heard it; I can’t tell you how great that made me feel.”

And what about their duet? “Renato suggested that we put one duet on the album, and we’re sitting around thinking of all the Brazilian singers we know — like Ivan Lins — and then he said ‘maybe you should ask Ruben.’ And I said, ‘but he’s not Brazilian!’ Once I agreed, we had to coordinate schedules and such, but it came through and I’m thrilled that Ruben decided to do it in Portugese.”

Mason will be without her husband when she makes a special appearance at Barnes & Noble Lincoln Triangle on Monday, February 2, but she’s heading back to Panama in March to appear at a local jazz festival and is beginning to make plans for a U.S. tour. (The couple is also planning to move back to New York from Los Angeles.) And while she hopes to return to Broadway soon, this new direction suits her just fine right now. “I am so lucky to have tapped into something that I love just as much as theater.”