For Duncan Sheik, new artistic avenues opening up

DETROIT - Having conquered the Great White Way with "Spring Awakening," singer/songwriter Duncan Sheik's dance card is suddenly filled with more theater projects - plus film prospects and a covers album.

"It's exciting, actually," Sheik said. "I'm really enjoying working in the theater and I'm really excited about these various film things that are coming up, and of course I hope to keep making records."

Sheik and "Spring Awakening" collaborator Steven Sater are adapting Hans Christian Andersen's "The Nightingale" for the stage, and Sheik is working with "30 Rock" actor Keith Powell on another piece titled "The Lighthouse Project."

He's also negotiating for some film scores and is preparing for the inevitable big-screen adaptation of the critically lauded "Spring Awakening."

"It's a little bit of a complicated subject," he says. "I think it will certainly be made as a movie at some point, but the reality is they want the show to run on Broadway.

"There's going to be a tour in the States now, it looks like. We're gonna do the show in Germany. We may do it in London. So, I'm not exactly sure when the movie would get made.

"It depends on a bunch of other kind of intervening factors. There are definitely a few [studios] that want to make the movie, but we have nothing in stone yet."

This summer Sheik hopes to hit the studio to record covers of some of his favorite '80s songs, including the Psychedelic Furs' "The Ghost in You," the Thompson Twins' "Hold Me Now," and Depeche Mode's "Fly on the Windscreen."

"It's all kind of songs that were either pop songs or else kind of arty-synth pop music of that era, that were really important to me as a teenager," he says.

But Sheik, who hopes to put the album out before the end of the year, promises his versions will offer "a different take on that material.

"A lot of them are very complex in terms of arrangements," he explains, "so it's really about simplifying them and finding the important parts of those songs and making sure those are there and stripping away the stuff that's maybe of less importance." *