Duncan Sheik, singer-songwriter and ‘Spring Awakening’ composer, dies at 56

Duncan Sheik, the singer-songwriter behind the 1996 hit “Barely Breathing” who later found his creative home on Broadway as the Tony Award-winning composer of “Spring Awakening,” died Thursday in Manhattan. His mother, Suzanne Sheik, told The New York Times the cause was cardiac arrest.

The news comes two days after Mr. Sheik’s family announced he had been hospitalized and remained in critical but stable condition following an unspecified health issue, according to a statement his relatives said was posted on the singer’s Instagram account.

Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, in 1969, Mr. Sheik studied semiotics at Brown University, where he played guitar alongside classmate Lisa Loeb before she scored her own No. 1 hit, “Stay (I Missed You),” in 1994.

Mr. Sheik’s self-titled 1996 debut album produced “Barely Breathing,” an aching account of a dying relationship that reached No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 and remained on the chart for 55 weeks — at the time the fourth-longest run in the chart’s history. The single earned him a Grammy nomination and cast him, somewhat against his will, as an MTV-era heartthrob.

Uneasy with that image, Mr. Sheik pursued a quieter, more classically inflected sound on later albums such as “Humming” (1998) and “Phantom Moon” (2001). He recalled in a 2011 interview that when he arrived in Los Angeles in 1992, he “could barely sing in public to save my life.”

That early reticence gave way to a second career in musical theater. Mr. Sheik met the writer Steven Sater, a fellow adherent of Nichiren Buddhism, and the two developed a rock-musical adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play “Spring Awakening.” The show opened Off-Broadway in 2006 before transferring to Broadway, where it ran for 859 performances and won eight Tony Awards, including best musical. Mr. Sheik himself won two, for best original score and best orchestrations.

He went on to write scores for other stage productions, including “American Psycho” and “Alice by Heart.” His work was still unfolding at the time of his death: a new musical, “Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen,” adapted from a Moyoco Anno manga, is scheduled to begin previews Off-Broadway on Sept. 25, and casting was announced this week for a revival of “Spring Awakening,” which begins previews Nov. 27 and opens Dec. 17 at Studio Seaview.

Mr. Sheik is survived by his wife, Nora Ariffin; their daughter, Ines Sheik; his parents; and his half-siblings, Peter and Kacie.