The writing of ‘Spring’

NEW YORK —  As the tragically misunderstood teens of “Spring Awakening” could tell you, sometimes parents just don’t get it.

“I remember being on the phone with my mom about five years ago,” singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik recalled recently, sitting between a pair of vintage rock organs in a makeshift music studio in Manhattan.

In 2003, Sheik was touring to support what would be his last major-label album, “Daylight,” and Mom had some unsolicited staging suggestions.

“She was like, ‘Duncan, I saw Madonna on the “Today” show this morning, and they showed footage from her concert. She’s got dancers and lights, it’s a whole experience -- I don’t understand, why don’t you have that?’ ”

Sheik patiently pointed out the exponential budgetary chasm between a brand-name pop extravaganza and a solo tour by an artist with a single major chart hit (1996’s “Barely Breathing”). But if he was looking to tout his own theatrical ambitions, he could have pointed to a project he had begun with playwright Steven Sater: a pop/rock musical based on Frank Wedekind’s oft-banned 1891 play “Spring Awakening.”

At the time, of course, Sheik, a theater newbie, didn’t foresee the Broadway phenom that would emerge in 2006 from this unlikely premise -- complete with lights and dancers, Ma -- let alone the eight Tony Awards, the long Broadway run, the nearly assured place in the musical theater canon. A sit-down production in London opens next January, and the show’s U.S. tour docks at the Ahmanson this week.

For his part, playwright and lyricist Sater vividly recalls another momentous phone conversation along the show’s bumpy road.

“I still remember, I was on the phone, walking down West 57th, and Duncan was saying that what he disliked in musical theater was when people talked, then started singing -- it seemed arbitrary,” said Sater recently from L.A., where he spends most of his time. “And I said that the songs in our show could function as interior monologues. That’s where this concept was born.”

This snap decision by a pair of musical-theater novices would develop over the years, with the helpful guidance of old hands like director Michael Mayer (“Thoroughly Modern Millie,” “Side Man”), into the show’s signature storytelling gambit.

“Spring Awakening” is now best known as the show in which 19th century German schoolboys take a break from conjugating Latin to wail profane thoughts on another sort of conjugating, and a chorus of schoolgirls sets down their woodruff to pick up hand-held microphones and pant over the class bad boy. “We all have our junk / And my junk is you,” they sing. There are plenty of jumps to the left and steps to the right, but every number in “Spring Awakening” is a time warp.

The importance of this pop-Brechtian gimmick to the show’s success, however, may be overstated. Though Sheik and Sater have matched form to content in a novel way, “Spring Awakening” connects with audiences chiefly because it does what all the best musicals do: It turns songs into the storytelling partners of the scenes. In this case, they only look mismatched, in a punk-rock sort of way.

“In truth, as much as Steven and I were always saying, ‘We’re writing an anti-musical -- we’re breaking all the rules,’ in fact at the end of the day, there are many aspects of the show that are incredibly traditional,” Sheik conceded. “It’s just that we found a device that puts the actual transition between scene and song in the foreground, instead of trying to hide it.”

Indeed, though Sater goes so far as to refer to “a divorce between the script and the songs,” in fact the relationship of music and action of “Spring Awakening” more closely resembles its central love story. Like the star-crossed romance between an earnest rebel, Melchior, and a credulous, soulful maiden, Wendla, Sheik and Sater’s sensual score strives yearningly, and tragically incompletely, across an imposed divide.

“From the beginning I did not want to write lyrics that forwarded the plot of the story,” Sater explained. “I like songs that take you into the profound heart of the story. So the songs become the subtext of the scene.” In the play’s central lovers’ clinch, then, “Melchior and Wendla may be nervous and inarticulate on the surface,” Sater said, “but underneath they’re saying, ‘I’m gonna be wounded/ I’m gonna be your wound.’ ”

In singing their subtext, though, the youthful characters do so absent any trace of adult self-awareness.

“It’s innocent; it’s not ironic or postmodern,” Sater averred. “These songs say, ‘This is the deep truth of my soul and I’m going to express it this way.’ ”

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A pervasive frankness

OK, OK -- its storytelling style is not the only thing “Spring Awakening” is famous for. It has also been celebrated for putting teen sexuality and its discontents center stage more graphically than your average Broadway property.

But it’s not so much the flashes of flesh and heavy petting that jolt some audiences. It’s the pervasive frankness and earnest empathy with which the show treats issues -- sexual initiation, same-sex desires, domestic abuse, suicidal frustration -- more often addressed titteringly or sheepishly, if at all, by entertainers and educators.

This, of course, makes “Spring Awakening” more or less true to Wedekind’s provocative original, which he wrote to attack what he saw as the hypocritical moralism of the schools and churches of his time.

That’s certainly why the play, though written in 1891, wasn’t produced in Germany until 1906 and has been banned or censored repeatedly since then.

Sater had been “riveted and moved” by the play in high school, but it “wasn’t some dream project of mine.”

It came to his mind when he and Sheik, friends from the Soka Gakkai Buddhist community, first began writing songs together and casting around for theater ideas.

“Duncan said he wanted to write music that was relevant to the culture at large, not just the sort of music you hear in musical theater,” Sater recalled. “The moment he said that, these intuitions started stirring. It was 1999, and we were all thinking these millennial thoughts. I thought one way of looking forward would be to look back.

“And this play was so full of the anguish, the yearning of young people that was bottled up -- and where do you find the expression of those same yearnings? In pop music, rock music.”

In translating and musicalizing the German original, Sater realized that certain aspects of the often scalding, relentlessly bleak original cried out for tempering.

“I started out vowing to be faithful to Wedekind,” Sater said. “But in introducing songs that took you into the hearts and minds of these characters, you really wanted to go on a journey with them.”

In Wedekind’s original, for instance, Melchior and Wendla aren’t exactly Romeo and Juliet. As Sater puts it, “He beats her, he rapes her, and he never sees her again. I really wanted to tell a different story.” For one, “I thought the sex should be consensual. And we had to make a hero’s journey for Melchior, and we wanted to see Wendla uncover her sensuality a little bit and enjoy it.”

That didn’t sit well with some detractors. Last year author Jonathan Franzen issued a new translation of the play with a foreword attacking the musical as “insipid” and sneering at its version of the deflowering scene as a “thunderous spectacle of ecstasy and consent.”

It’s safe to say, though, that few Broadway shows have had ingenues aflutter for flagellation, or a torrid love scene between a teenage boy and a dog-eared photograph. Indeed, in what might seem a reversal of expectations, it is the material from the classic play that retains a sting of shock, and it’s the pop/rock score that’s user-friendly, accessible, inviting.

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Insistent grooves

Sheik’s score is remarkable in a number of ways, but in one way above all: With its spacious harmonies and insistent grooves, it was clearly composed on the guitar. While that’s been a default sound in pop music since the Beatles, it is shockingly rare in the musical theater.

Sheik is such a thoroughgoing guitar-pop songsmith, in fact, that he doesn’t consider that he “writes” melodies at all.

“I write chords,” Sheik explained. “I use alternate tunings of the guitar a lot, and what happens, typically, is I’ll find a kind of a chordal motif or a set of chord progressions, and they kind of suggest melodies, and then the melodies just kind of rise up out of the chords in some weird way.”

Though he’s warmed up to a wider palette of musical colors since he began “Spring Awakening,” Sheik is still most influenced by English art-pop, 20th century classical music, and non-Western world music than by Sondheim or Lloyd Webber.

“For example, I loved ‘Grey Gardens,’ but those sounds are not in my wheelhouse,” Sheik admitted. For his next theater projects with Sater -- an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Nightingale,” an original musical about the Roman emperor Nero -- the musical landscapes are more “chamber-y . . . there are no electric guitars at all.”

These days, a more circumspect Sheik looks back on that awkward phone conversation with his mom with fresh insight.

“Sitting in the audience at ‘Spring Awakening’ -- not that it’s a Madonna show, remotely, but there is this amazing lighting aesthetic, this Bill T. Jones movement, there’s a great narrative -- all that stuff does in fact add up. So, as absurd as I thought that whole conversation with my mom was, what I realized recently is that I love using music as a way of kind of deepening a narrative, and conversely I love having a narrative there to make the music really resonate.

“Of course, I didn’t know it at the time.”

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‘Spring Awakening’

Where: Ahmanson Theatre,

135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: Thursday to Dec. 7

Price: $30 to $100

Contact: (213) 628-2772 or www.CenterTheatreGroup.org