Mikaela Sullivan, Leo Spiegel and Kevin Webb in a scene from Black Button Eyes Productions’ Chicago premiere of “Whisper House.” | Evan Hanover
The fog that “Whisper House” can’t minimize by comes right down to its creators and their odd mismatch of tones.
Nearly 1 / 4 of a century in the past, Duncan Sheik was briefly inescapable. “Barely Breathing,” the lead single from the singer-songwriter’s self-titled debut album, spent greater than a yr on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in 1996 and 1997, and earned Sheik a Grammy nomination for finest male pop vocal efficiency.
Sheik has by no means had one other chart hit, however he’s removed from a one-hit surprise; over the past 20 years he’s change into a revered composer of musical theater. After writing a rating for a 2002 Public Theater manufacturing of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” Sheik gained a Tony Award for his first Broadway outing, 2006’s thrillingly form-bending “Spring Awakening.”
Sheik returned to Broadway in 2013 with an adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel “American Psycho,” and a brand new musical based mostly on the 1969 movie “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice,” with Sheik penning the rating, opens Off Broadway later this month.
But it’s Sheik’s quick followup to his “Spring Awakening” success that’s at present on provide on the Athenaeum Theatre. A whisper-thin ghost story titled “Whisper House,” this curious little piece premiered at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in 2010 and is just now receiving its Chicago premiere, in a manufacturing by the plucky Black Button Eyes Productions. To be charitable to Sheik, you would possibly chalk it as much as a sophomore stoop.
Written with playwright Kyle Jarrow, whose personal resume contains delightfully off-kilter tasks like “A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant” and the “SpongeBob SquarePants” musical, “Whisper House” is about at a lighthouse on the coast of Maine in 1942. Ten-year-old Christopher (Leo Spiegel), whose father’s demise within the battle has pushed his mom to commit herself to a psychological ward, has been despatched right here to stick with an aunt he by no means knew he had.
The aunt, who tells Christopher to name her Miss Lily (Kate Nawrocki), is flinty and emotionally closed off; she has no concept how you can elevate a grieving little one, as she repeatedly tells her lighthouse worker, Yasuhiro (Karmann Bajuyo), whose standing as a Japanese immigrant is about to change into an issue.
Evan Hanover Kate Nawrocki, Leo Spiegel and Mikaela Sullivan star in Black Button Eyes Productions’ “Whisper House.”
That’s introduced by Charles (T.J. Anderson), the native sheriff, who drops by to put in a brand new Coast Guard radio that may carry orders to douse the sunshine when German U-boats are noticed close to the shore; Charles additionally tells Lily that Yasuhiro has bought to go, an order she’s inclined to withstand.
And then there are the ghosts. Two spirits, performed right here by Mikaela Sullivan and Kevin Webb, function quasi-narrators and carry out the lion’s share of Sheik’s songs, beginning with the introductory quantity through which they inform us: “When everything is done / And everything is said / Life is naught but pain / It’s better to be dead.”
But the ghosts’ perform within the story is frustratingly imprecise. Christopher can type of hear them, it appears, and so they would possibly serve to egg on his extra damaging impulses. But they aren’t precisely menacing, and positively not what you’d name haunting; they’re nearer to aggressively twee.
And their standing as exterior observers implies that Sheik’s songs are principally passive, by no means advancing the narrative a lot as recapping or underlining it. That the songs stand aside from the story solely serves to focus on their dissociation from its interval. The whole aesthetic of “Spring Awakening” is geared to make sense of why its 19th-century German youngsters escape into indignant rock ’n’ roll. But right here, there’s no sense of why the 1940s ghosts of people that died in…