The American composer and songwriter Duncan Sheik, who won two Tony Awards for Spring Awakening and whose new musical Nero opens in London in November, has died at the age of 56.
Sheik died on Thursday night at a hospital in Manhattan, as reported by the Associated Press. His mother, Suzanne Sheik, confirmed the death to The New York Times, and it was announced in a post on the composer’s own Instagram account. He had been in and out of hospital over the past month, and his team said on Wednesday that he was in a critical but stable condition.
“Duncan was a father, husband, son, brother, and friend,” a statement issued on the family’s behalf said. “He will be remembered for his sensitivity, wit, intelligence, and depth of spirit he brought to those who knew and loved him.”
His standing in the theatre rests on Spring Awakening, which he wrote with the playwright and lyricist Steven Sater from Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play about a group of German teenagers and the things nobody would tell them. Neither man had written a musical before. It opened on Broadway in 2006, ran for more than 860 performances and won eight Tony Awards including best musical, two of them Sheik’s, along with the Grammy for best musical show album.
Britain took to it quickly. The first London production opened at the Lyric Hammersmith on 23 January 2009, transferred to the Novello Theatre on 21 March and closed on 30 May, collecting four Laurence Olivier Awards including Best New Musical. Rupert Goold directed a revival at the Almeida Theatre in 2021.
Goold had also directed the world premiere of Sheik’s American Psycho, at the Almeida in 2013, with Matt Smith as Patrick Bateman — a London opening for an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel that reached Broadway in 2016 and closed inside 90 performances. Sheik wrote the lyrics as well as the music, and set his own songs beside sly reworkings of In the Air Tonight and Hip to Be Square.
Whisper House, a ghost story for which he wrote both music and lyrics, was first staged at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego in 2010 and had its UK premiere at The Other Palace in 2017. Alice by Heart, written with Sater and Jessie Nelson and set in a London Underground shelter during the Blitz, was first presented at the National Theatre in 2012 and staged off-Broadway in 2019.
He leaves a show six weeks from its first night. Nero, written again with Sater, has its world premiere at Southwark Playhouse Elephant on 2 November, directed by Lindsay Posner and starring Andrew Barth Feldman in the title role. Full casting, including Stephen Carlile and Sally Dexter, was announced this week.
None of it was the career he began with. Sheik grew up between South Carolina and New Jersey, learned the guitar as a child and had his first synthesiser at 12; he took a semiotics degree at Brown and played backing guitar for his contemporary Lisa Loeb before moving to Los Angeles in 1992. His self-titled debut album followed in 1996, and the single Barely Breathing spent 55 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number 16 and earning a Grammy nomination in 1998.
He did not much enjoy what came with it. “I thought, I’m not going to win in this game of trying to be Justin Timberlake,” he told the Houston Chronicle in 2022. “Maybe I should try and do something different.”
The something different lasted a quarter of a century. Sheik and Sater were both practising Buddhists and met while chanting; they were working on Sheik’s third album, Phantom Moon, when the subject of a musical came up. Records kept arriving alongside the theatre work — a 2011 collection of covers of 1980s British acts among them — and the last of them, the ambient Claptrap, was released in 2022.
“I love Stephen Sondheim,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2015. “But it’s my mission to make sure that the theater is paying attention to what the rest of the world is listening to.”
Nero is booking now at Southwark Playhouse Elephant, where it runs from Monday 2 November to Saturday 5 December 2026.
