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.
