Before Spring Awakening won eight Tony awards in 2007, its dramatist and lyricist Steven Sater had “been struggling financially and professionally for quite a while,” he remembers. But only now, after two decades of workshops and showcases for potential backers, is Nero receiving its second full professional production. But producers still balked at whether Nero could be sympathetic or relatable.
Sater is convinced that this objection has been addressed by the casting in the London production of Andrew Barth Feldman, star of Broadway’s Dear Evan Hansen: “He’s charismatic and endearing. We wrote Nero as a showman, like Richard III.” Sater’s pleasure at Nero’s return has been cruelly diluted by Sheik’s recent death aged 56. The day before we talk, Sater Zoomed into the first read-through for the current New York revival of Spring Awakening.
Thinking of Duncan and me with those young people in the first production 20 years ago.” From London, Sater also watched an online tribute to Sheik at the Dramatists Guild Foundation Gala, a performance of Touch Me from Spring Awakening which, though describing sexual stimulation, is also a sort of lament: “It was his favourite song. Duncan saw sadness in a way that nobody else did. He had a real sense of tragic destiny.
And the irony is that he had one.” The duo “never worked in the same room”, he says. I wrote the lyric and then he wrote the music, setting exactly what I’d written. When we got notes from a director, I’d have to cajole Duncan into rewriting.
Often we’d replace the whole song rather than change it.” On Alice by Heart, their 2012 version of Alice in Wonderland set in London during the Blitz, Sater would “sometimes, if Duncan wasn’t available, take a song cut from Spring Awakening and write a new lyric”. Improbably, this is one of two London autumn shows based on the work of the Roman historian Suetonius. In Caryl Churchill’s Triumph, a press secretary briefs reporters about a Trumpian emperor.
Sater accepts that the belated staging of Nero reflects a perceived overlap between contemporary America and the final lurid decline of imperial Rome, although he made the connection much earlier than most observers. In 2003, President George W Bush landed in a fighter jet on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and declared the Iraq war won with the words: Mission Accomplished. Apart from drawing on Suetonius for Nero and Wedekind for Spring Awakening, Sater also wrote a musical based on Aeschylus’s Prometheus Unbound, is working with James Bourne of Busted on a show inspired by Schnitzler’s La Ronde and, in his memoir A Purple Summer, attributes one Spring Awakening lyric to “my misremembering of Racine’s Phèdre”.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
