Finishing Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen After Duncan Sheik's Death

In 2020, Leah Nanako Winkler was hired to do something she’d never done before: write a musical.

Born in Japan and raised in Kentucky, Winkler’s works—most notably, 2016’s Kentucky and 2018’s God Said This—have received off-Broadway and regional productions and a variety of awards.

First and foremost, though, she considers herself a playwright, not a librettist. But the opportunity to adapt Moyoco Anno’s manga Memoirs of Amorous Gentleman proved tempting.

I thought it was a very strange choice,” Winkler says. “Even though the marketing presents it as, like, Moulin Rouge!, it’s actually about a young sex worker in Paris who realizes she’s an artist. Winkler was “excited by the prospect of translating [Anno’s] tone correctly into an American musical,” while also seeing a lot of herself in the protagonist, Colette, the prostitute who discovers her purpose while chronicling the lives of the men she services.

“The character goes through a lot of the experiences we all do in our 20s, like being caught up in the wrong guy, and using her hardships for material. I also,” Winkler adds, preparing to drop an unsolicited factoid about her personal life, “worked at a dominatrix dungeon.”

“I was really bad at it,” she follows with a laugh. “It’s really hard.” But it proved fertile ground. “When I was at this specific dungeon, there was this holding room, and there were a lot of extremely smart women who’d sit around waiting for clients, and we’d have conversations, and I’d be writing everything down.” She took her firsthand knowledge of the subject matter, and her admiration for the way Anno “respects these women who work at the brothel,” into her meeting with director Rob Ashford and songwriter Duncan Sheik and got the job.

That’s where Winkler met Or Matias, Sheik’s musical righthand man. Matias, a go-to orchestrator and music supervisor, became acquainted with Sheik while brainstorming a potential fundraising concert after the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018. “That was the nucleus of our friendship, which resulted in me spending a lot of time at his home, just hanging out and talking music,” Matias says. “And then, pretty shortly after, he started throwing projects my way, saying, ‘We speak a very similar musical language, so we should collaborate.'”

Winkler, Sheik, and Mathias dug deep into the mores of fin de siècle Paris to create Memoirs, which is now running at the former McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea (rechristened the Night Egg after the brothel in the story). “Duncan and I really did a lot of research,” Winkler says, noting her interest in exploring “why a woman using her sexuality to her advantage is automatically seen as a bad thing. Some women back then wanted to work at brothels because they loved the clothes. They wanted to have a lifestyle, rather than working as a seamstress or becoming a wife. I’m interested in exploring an attitude about it that you haven’t necessarily seen before.”

As is typical of Sheik’s oeuvre, the music, Matias says, “feels like it came from the inner bits of his visceral soul. Everything he writes is so immediately evocative. The emotional thrust of every moment is in conversation with the dramatic thrust Leah created.” He describes Sheik as “one of the smartest people I’d ever met. He went to Brown and studied semiotics, and that’s fine. But his actual level of intelligence and understanding, both in pedestrian day-to-day things and philosophy—he spent hours and hours trying to understand what the essence of the human spirit is. I think every note that he wrote came from that depth.”

That Memoirs is Matias and Sheik’s first collaboration to actually reach the stage is not lost on him (he’ll also musical-direct Danya Taymor’s Spring Awakening revival this winter). “All those years of friendship have come to fruition,” Matias says candidly, “at the saddest time possible.”

How do you finish a show when you’re without one of your essential collaborators? That’s what Winkler and Matias have found themselves wondering over the last few weeks. Sheik took ill over the summer. He died, at the age of 56, just seven days before the show started performances.

“He was very much wanting to take it to the finish line,” Winkler says. “And he was really doing his best up until he couldn’t.” Even during what we now realize were his final days, Sheik was still providing wisdom. “I was in the hospital room,” Matias continues, “he was hooked up to everything, he had been there for a while, it seemed like he was half asleep, and then, suddenly, this dramaturgical lightbulb went off.”

“He was still giving me notes,” Winkler adds with disbelief. “I texted Or and was like, ‘I can’t believe he gave me a note. And I can’t believe it was good.'”

Without Sheik, Matias has taken on the added responsibility of safeguarding the musical elements now that the show is on its feet. “The material we are using is exclusively Duncan’s,” he says. “What I am doing is taking it and putting the puzzle pieces together in a way that best serves the evolution that we’re needing to find during previews. It’s been a very interesting challenge to figure out how to meet the needs of an evolving piece, while doing so with a pool of material that is fixed in a certain way.”

Because there are electronic elements to the score, Matias has managed to covertly incorporate some of Sheik’s backing vocals, and there’s another track that features Sheik playing guitar. “Unbeknownst to everybody, he’s kind of there, looking after us.”

Winkler, meanwhile, is responding in real time to a function that has changed for her, as well. “I feel like I’m trying to finish this painting,” she says, tears starting to well in her eyes. “The score was there on the first day of rehearsals, so for me, it’s less about waking up nervous and more about wishing he were here so that he could see what it’s become, because I know he would have had opinions. Now, it’s like, ‘Maybe this should have been a song, but it’s gonna be a monologue.'”

As deaths often do, Sheik’s has brought everyone involved closer together. “I have this incredible dramaturg named Anna O’Donohue, who is going above and beyond,” says Winkler. “She read a new scene I wrote yesterday at 3am. There’s Ben Butler, who has been friends with Duncan for many, many years, wailing on the guitar every night. The music director, Amanda Morton, has been amazing. Sophia Anne Caruso [who plays Colette] has been there from the very first table read of only Act 1, so she has been a huge rock to me,” she says. “Our wheels are constantly spinning to make this as good as it can be,” Matias continues. “Everybody is so dialed in to honor the work.”

But perhaps the biggest piece of advice on getting Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen to opening night came from Sheik himself, in his own characteristically observant way.

As he lay in hospital, Winkler confessed that the prospect of finishing the show alone made her anxious. “Not that I was upset with him, I just didn’t know what to do,” Winkler says. That made Sheik laugh. “He was like ‘Ha, ha, ha. Musicals are never finished, Leah. They just close.”

And I was like, ‘I’m going to tell everyone you said that.'”