Sheik and Sater's 'Nero' Musical Broadway-Bound?
By: BWW News Desk Aug. 17, 2007
The New York Post's Michael Riedel reports that Nero, a collaboration by Spring Awakening Tony Award-winners Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater about the debauched Roman emperor, might conquer Broadway in the future.
"The Public Theater presented a reading of Nero last week, with substantial backing from Carole Shorenstein Hays, who'll produce the show on Broadway if it has commercial prospects," he writes. Euan Morton ( Taboo, Brundibar) starred as Nero, who reigned from 54 AD to 68 AD, while Jan Maxwell (Coram Boy, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) played his unscrupulous mother Agrippina.
"Nero makes Spring Awakening look like The Wedding Singer," said Sheik, who wrote the music of the former show with bookwriter/lyricist Sater. Sater, who drew upon Roman historians Seutonius and Tacitus for the musical, has written with Sheik a show "about a man who slept with his mother and then had her killed...(who) poisoned his friends and kicked his pregnant wife to death." according to Riedel, Sater has tried to draw a more sympathetic portrait of Nero than either Seutonius or Tacitus did.
"The literature that's affected me most is Ancient Greek. And the scandal of Nero's reign was always that he was more Greek than Roman. So I've had a kind of odd, demented attraction to the material," said Sater.
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