Duncan Sheik’s Gentlemanly, Raunchy Final Act

Duncan Sheik was, it seemed, always drawn to the dark. He first rose to fame as a singer-songwriter in 1996, a time when pop music was bouncing from the mopey grunge era into a period when bubblegum pop reigned, but his moody, thoughtful tunes stood apart, earning comparisons to the intricate, folky work of depressive cult favorite Nick Drake in the 1970s.When Sheik, whose death at just 56 years old rocked the arts world only last month, found his true creative home in musical theater, his breakout hit was “Spring Awakening.” Drawn from a German play published in the late 19th century that traced the tragic consequences of sexual repression and abuse for a group of teenagers, the show, which he adapted with lyricist and librettist Steven Sater, introduced the most hauntingly beautiful score heard on Broadway in the past 20 years.Sheik’s next Broadway outing, “American Psycho,” drew from a more recent source, the Bret Easton Ellis novel tracking a finance bro who moonlights as a serial killer. Later New York premieres included the underrated “Alice By Heart,” another collaboration with Mr. Sater that relocated Lewis Carroll’s young heroine to a bomb shelter during World War II, and “Whisper House,” a musical ghost story named after and using material from one of Sheik’s albums.The latter two shows were produced off-Broadway, which is where Sheik’s final outing has arrived posthumously. “Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen,” for which he wrote music and lyrics to accompany a book by Leah Nanako Winkler, is an adaptation of the manga graphic novel by Moyoco Anno, which has been translated into English and other languages since first being serialized in Japanese.Like that novel, the new musical follows Colette, a young romantic who finds work at a Paris brothel. Veteran scenic designer Scott Pask, a five-time Tony Award winner, has transformed part of The Culture Club, a venue on West 27th Street, into The Night Egg, the maison close where Colette lives and works; with its stage in close proximity to the audience, who sit in rows and at tables lit by red lamps, the setup evokes an off-Broadway recreation of the most recent, more garish revival of “Cabaret.”The decadence on tap at this house of ill repute, though, might make even that classic musical’s frisky Emcee blush. In an opening number titled “Your Perversion Is Our Pleasure,” Colette and her colleagues strut across the stage, promising to cater to their customers’ whims — and some of them are doozies. To a man with a bird fetish, the madame croons, “Strip off your fetid kit/We’ll apply the Vaseline/We’ll cover you in feathers and call you ‘philistine.’”In case we haven’t gotten the point, Colette, in the next scene, gives a potential client the rundown of their day: “Just this morning, we put a grown man in a diaper and rubbed his lower belly with a wet piece of gauze for two hours until he finally released.”But this client, Sakae, a son of privilege from Japan, isn’t interested in anything so exotic, or even in more conventional hanky-panky. Fascinated by Colette’s plight, he offers to pay her to write down her thoughts, focusing on four questions: What makes her laugh, what makes her cry, what she longs for, and what is her own perversion.Thus the ground is laid for a 90-minute exploration of yearning, not just of the sexual variety but for security and self-actualization. Along the way we’ll meet other young women with their own struggles, and spend rather too much time with a chap named Léon, to whom Colette remains devoted although the show’s creators—perhaps led by the source material, which I haven’t read—might as well have tattooed the words “worthless cad” on the actor’s forehead.Though several songs start off promisingly, none of them crept into my bones as quickly as those in “Spring Awakening” (which is being revived off-Broadway later this fall) and some from Sheik’s other shows did. The composer did craft, with Or Matias, lovely orchestrations, particularly for the ballads, with robust, sometimes melancholic keyboards and flashes of accordion that enhance the ambience of the setting.There are also more upbeat and muscular numbers, some with wailing guitars, others using electro-pop textures to establish a more desperate or frantic vibe. The lyrics can prove less effective, sometimes straining to rhyme and occasionally crossing the line from irreverence into cringe; one pair of lines rhymes “runt” with a word I can’t use here.Veteran director and choreographer Rob Ashford nonetheless juggles a brisk pace and a brooding vibe with great style, and “Memoirs” also provides a fine showcase for Sophia Anne Caruso, an alumna of Broadway’s “Beetlejuice,” whose pert, plucky presence and siren-like vocals are well suited to the role of Colette.I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s worth noting that it couldn’t be called sad. “Look at the sky/Find its art…Find your peace,” Colette sings in the final number. Certainly, Sheik found the art and we can hope he’s at peace now.

Duncan Sheik’s Gentlemanly, Raunchy Final Act

Duncan Sheik’s Gentlemanly, Raunchy Final Act

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