Exclusive: Opening MEMOIRS OF AMOROUS GENTLEMEN Without Duncan Sheik Was ‘Uncharted Territory’

One week before the gritty new manga musical Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen began Off-Broadway previews on September 25, its composer — Tony Award-winning songwriter Duncan Sheik — tragically died at age 56. However, the profound mark he left on the theater world would live on. 

“Everyone rallied,” Memoirs director Rob Ashford exclusively tells BroadwayWorld, adding that the cast and creative team had “something to strive for rather than good reviews and shorter running time and being a hit.”

“We were all focused on doing it for Duncan,” he says. “Making him proud.” 

Though it came as a shock to many when Sheik’s family revealed on September 16 that the songwriter was hospitalized in critical condition, he had been privately dealing with health issues, and the Memoirs creative team had to navigate what that looked like for the show even before his death. 

Music supervisor Or Matias, who is also responsible for the show’s vocal and incidental arrangements, became more integrated in the process. 

When Sheik “was not able to be with us in the room any longer,” Matias tells BroadwayWorld, “he gave the team his full blessing for me to take on that role” of spearheading how the music and story integrate alongside book writer Leah Nanako Winkler.  

“Duncan and I shared a pretty incredible trust musically,” Matias explains. “So there was a certain point where he basically said, ‘I trust Or; treat him like your collaborator.’ And I was very, very fortunate to have both a director and a book writer who embraced that notion wholeheartedly.” 

Though Sheik couldn’t be in rehearsals towards the end of his life, he was still giving feedback until he couldn’t any longer. He was very passionate about the project after being asked personally by Ashford to musicalize Moyoco Anno’s award-winning manga about a Parisian underworld filled with sex and desire. 

“When he was ill, there were a couple days where I would visit him,” Matias recalls. “I would come with a laptop, and Leah would Zoom in, and we’d go through all these ideas that we had. Even when he was unwell, it was just so clear — his brilliance shown through.” 

On September 17, Sheik — a groundbreaking force in musical theater known for his haunting melodies on Spring Awakening, Alice by Heart and more — died at the hospital surrounded by loved ones.

“It was devastating, no question,” Ashford says, explaining that members of the cast and creative team — no matter how long they’d known Sheik — were “keen to comfort each other” in the days that followed.

Their first preview, held exactly one week after Sheik’s death was announced, was filled with a flurry of emotion: excitement, since the show was finally being put on its feet; pride in presenting the songwriter’s final work; and, for all, profound grief. 

“It just felt very, very sad for me personally that he wasn’t there with us — that he wasn’t there the next morning at 10 o’clock on the phone with me saying, ‘We should rethink this,’” Ashford admits. “That moment was quite a big hole. It was a loss. It was a void. I could definitely feel his spirit there, but without the words, without the guidance.” 

From that moment on, it was agreed that no additional music would be written for Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen without Sheik. However, Matias and the team are able to take preexisting material and move pieces around.  

“We were not going to generate new material,” explains Matias. “But we are finding ways to modify existing music, so it’s a little bit like moving around puzzle pieces.” 

“For example,” he says, “if we change a scene before a song, and it changes the dramatic thrust of the song, I can’t change the music that Duncan wrote, but I can change the vocal arrangement or the orchestration in order to inform that rewrite.” 

“It’s been a tricky scenario and uncharted territory for me,” Matias adds, “but I feel incredibly proud of what we were able to do given the circumstances.” 

Because Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen was previously workshopped, the creative team had a catalog of other material Sheik penned specifically for the musical. 

“We’ve been looking at those and saying, ‘Would it be helpful to use this or would it be helpful to actually take a little bit of this content melodically and use it as a framework for underscoring or arranging?’” Matias explains. 

Plus, Sheik actually lives within Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen. 

“There’s one little Easter egg moment in one of the songs,” Matias says. “In the demo that he had made, he recorded this floaty backing vocal. I took that and sampled and manipulated it and added it in one of the electronic moments. Nobody would ever be able to recognize or hear it, but I know that there’s this tiny part of him that’s there.” 

As for the evolution of Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen — which officially opens October 15 at The Night Egg at The Culture Club — Ashford says it “continues to grow, and he continues to be in the room with us all every night at different times in different ways.” 

“I think he’d be proud, and I think he’d be excited,” says Ashford. 

When it comes to putting on the show, “There’s this element of: This is actually bigger than any one individual person in this room,” says Matias. “This literally carries legacy.”