Duncan Sheik: From ‘Spring Awakening’ to ‘Winn-Dixie’ at Alabama Shakespeare Festival
Even Duncan Sheik was surprised when he got a telephone call about writing music for a stage version of “Because of Winn-Dixie,” the award-winning children’s book by Kate DiCamillo.
After all, Sheik, a singer-songwriter, had made the leap to the stage with uber-adult fare such as “Spring Awakening,” about teen angst and suicide, among other things; and “American Psycho,” about a businessman-turned-serial killer.
“When the producers first got in touch with me and told me what it was about, I hadn’t read the book, and I was thinking, ‘Why in the world are you guys calling me? I’m the last person who should be working on this,’” Sheik recalls. “But I read the book, and it was really charming. I kind of had an idea in my head what the sound of the show could be or might be, so I said, ‘Let’s give this a shot.’”
That was 2012, and now “Because of Winn-Dixie,” after three different directors and several early productions, is being mounted at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery. The hope is that this production, which runs through Feb. 12, is on its way to Broadway.
It certainly has the pedigree for it.
Director John Rando is a Tony Award-winner for “Urinetown” and a nominee for “On the Town,” among many other acclaimed productions; Nell Benjamin, the book writer and lyricist, earned a Tony nomination for her work on “Legally Blonde”; and Sheik won Tony and Grammy Awards for “Spring Awakening,” as well as critical acclaim for “American Psycho.”
“We always joked that I had ‘American Psycho’ going on one end and ‘Because of Winn-Dixie’ on the other,” Sheik says. “The natural progression would be to do ‘Cujo.’”
“Because of Winn-Dixie” is about a dog named after the grocery store chain. DiCamillo’s tale about the pooch who breathes new life into a family that moves to a small Southern town won the Newbery Award, the top award for children’s books.
The musical version has undergone many changes after performances in Arkansas and Delaware, says Sheik, whose half-sister, Kacie Sheik, is among the stars.
“It has gotten a lot better, certainly in this iteration, and we’ve got an amazing new director in John Rando,” Sheik says. “I’m excited to come to Alabama and see where we’ve landed.”
Originally a 90-minute one-act show, Sheik and Benjamin have expanded the show.
“There are four new songs and we’ve made it into a two-act show,” he says. “We found that the younger kids were getting antsy after about an hour, and they needed a break.”
“Because of Winn-Dixie” is a return, in part, to the kind of melodic sounds that Sheik used to write and perform.
“In the first 20 years of my career, I was doing a lot of organic things with stringed instruments and that sort of thing,” Sheik says. “When I heard the score in its entirety for the first time, I was really pleased with it. It had some really old-school Duncan Sheik-type music.”
Sheik was involved with theater growing up on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. But in sixth grade, he joined a band.
“Suddenly, it was much cooler to be a guitarist in a band than to do show tunes,” he says with a laugh. “I stepped away from the theater at the tender age of 12, but I didn’t get back into it until I was 29.”
During that gap, his self-titled debut album went gold and spawned the hit single “Barely Breathing.” Other albums followed, and then, in 2006, he burst onto the off-Broadway and Broadway scene with “Spring Awakening.” The show launched the careers of Lea Michele, Jonathan Groff and John Gallagher Jr., among others. Sheik won Tonys for Best Score and Best Orchestrations, as well as a Grammy Award for the cast album.
His next big theater work would be “American Psycho,” a 2013 musical based on Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 book.
All are different in many ways but share some similarities, even with “Because of Winn-Dixie,” Sheik says.
“Some of these things certainly have a very specific harmonic and melodic sensibility that people recognize as being, for lack of a better word, a ‘Duncan Sheik kind of sound,’” he says. “But I have been experimenting with genre quite a bit. ‘American Psycho’ is electronic music; ‘Spring Awakening’ is more indie rock; ‘Because of Winn-Dixie’ is sort of a gumbo of Southern rock, folk and blues, with some gospel in there, too.
“There’s a mixture of a lot of different Southern genres that I’m kind of messing around with and trying to make my own,” Sheik adds. “I don’t want it to be boiler-plate.”