Nero Finally Reaches London, Two Decades After Spring Awakening

Steven Sater's musical Nero opens its second full professional production this week — twenty years after its first — running at Southwark Playhouse Elephant in London until 5 December. The show about the Roman emperor who murdered his mother reached San Francisco in 2006, then spent two decades in workshops and showcases for potential backers.

"I think maybe my work is too expensive for subsidised theatre and too risky for commercial theatre," Sater says. "I don't think that — audiences respond to my work — but I suspect producers may believe it."

The lyricist wrote Nero with composer Duncan Sheik, his collaborator on Spring Awakening, which won eight Tony awards in 2007. Before that success, Sater had "been struggling financially and professionally for quite a while."

What changed for this production?

Producers long balked at whether Nero could be sympathetic. Sater says the London casting answers the objection: Andrew Barth Feldman, star of Broadway's Dear Evan Hansen, plays the emperor. "He's charismatic and endearing. We wrote Nero as a showman, like Richard III."

The revival's arrival is shadowed by loss. Sheik died recently, aged 56. The day before this interview, Sater Zoomed into the first read-through for the current New York revival of Spring Awakening. "That was emotional. I did break down. Thinking of Duncan and me with those young people in the first production 20 years ago."

From London, Sater also watched an online tribute to Sheik at the Dramatists Guild Foundation Gala: a performance of Touch Me from Spring Awakening. "It was his favourite song. Duncan saw sadness in a way that nobody else did. He had a real sense of tragic destiny. And the irony is that he had one."

The duo "never worked in the same room", Sater says. "It was like we shared a twin solitude. I wrote the lyric and then he wrote the music, setting exactly what I'd written." On their 2012 Blitz-set Alice by Heart, Sater would sometimes "take a song cut from Spring Awakening and write a new lyric" when Sheik was unavailable.

Why Nero, and why now?

Nero is one of two London autumn shows drawing on the Roman historian Suetonius; the other is Caryl Churchill's Triumph, in which a press secretary briefs reporters about a Trumpian emperor. Sater made the Rome-America connection early. In 2003, after George W Bush declared the Iraq war won aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln with the words "Mission Accomplished", Sater rang Sheik and said: "Rome is burning!"

"When the president of the United States is razing [part of] the White House to build himself a golden ballroom, we are finally ready for a musical about Nero," he says now. The show will be, he says, "frighteningly of the moment".

A classicist by accident

Sater's literary range is unusually deep, and literal accident explains it. At 20, he suffered multiple fractures and burns jumping from a third-floor balcony to escape a fire. "I was strapped to a board that turned me from back to front every two hours. I had page-turners made that I could operate with my teeth. And, that way, I taught myself Ancient Greek."

He then went to graduate school to study literature, and rejects commercial propositions accordingly. "Do I want to do a musical of Dances With Wolves or Jurassic Park? No, I don't. I could live my whole life in Suetonius or the Oresteia. I'm a classicist!"

His next project is a play, not a musical: a dramatisation of the assassination of John F Kennedy, "based verse by verse on Agamemnon by Aeschylus. Jackie Kennedy has the Cassandra speech in which she sees the future." The idea returned to him after he found Life magazine covers about JFK's death while clearing out his mother's house.

"I'm afraid we're looking at the death of American democracy. And so it is related to Nero in that way. It again felt so of this moment."