‘Whisper House’ skims the surface of its characters, both real and ghostly

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Duncan Sheik was briefly inescapable. “Barely Breathing,” the lead single from the singer-songwriter’s self-titled debut album, spent more than a year on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in 1996 and 1997, and earned Sheik a Grammy nomination for best male pop vocal performance.

Sheik has never had another chart hit, but he’s far from a one-hit wonder; over the last two decades he’s become a respected composer of musical theater. After writing a score for a 2002 Public Theater production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” Sheik won 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 new musical based on the 1969 film “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice,” with Sheik penning the score, opens Off Broadway later this month.

But it’s Sheik’s immediate followup to his “Spring Awakening” success that’s currently on offer at 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 only now receiving its Chicago premiere, in a production by the plucky Black Button Eyes Productions. To be charitable to Sheik, you might chalk it up to a sophomore slump.

Written with playwright Kyle Jarrow, whose own resume includes delightfully off-kilter projects like “A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant” and the “SpongeBob SquarePants” musical, “Whisper House” is set at a lighthouse on the coast of Maine in 1942. Ten-year-old Christopher (Leo Spiegel), whose father’s death in the war has driven his mother to commit herself to a mental ward, has been sent here to stay with an aunt he never knew he had.

The aunt, who tells Christopher to call her Miss Lily (Kate Nawrocki), is flinty and emotionally closed off; she has no idea how to raise a grieving child, as she repeatedly tells her lighthouse employee, Yasuhiro (Karmann Bajuyo), whose status as a Japanese immigrant is about to become a problem.

Evan Hanover

That’s announced by Charles (T.J. Anderson), the local sheriff, who drops by to install a new Coast Guard radio that will carry orders to douse the light when German U-boats are spotted near the shore; Charles also tells Lily that Yasuhiro has got to go, an order she’s inclined to resist.

And then there are the ghosts. Two spirits, played here by Mikaela Sullivan and Kevin Webb, serve as quasi-narrators and perform the lion’s share of Sheik’s songs, starting with the introductory number in which they tell us: “When everything is done / And everything is said / Life is naught but pain / It’s better to be dead.”

But the ghosts’ function in the story is frustratingly vague. Christopher can sort of hear them, it seems, and they might serve to egg on his more destructive impulses. But they aren’t exactly menacing, and certainly not what you’d call haunting; they’re closer to aggressively twee.

And their status as outside observers means that Sheik’s songs are mostly passive, never advancing the narrative so much as recapping or underlining it. That the songs stand apart from the story only serves to highlight their dissociation from its period. The entire aesthetic of “Spring Awakening” is geared to make sense of why its 19th-century German teenagers break out into angry rock ’n’ roll. But here, there’s no sense of why the 1940s ghosts of people who died in the 1920s sound like 1990s Adult Contemporary radio.

We get exasperatingly little insight into the primary characters’ inner lives — least of all Christopher’s. Jarrow renders them in shorthand; major plot developments, too, are given so little weight that they seem to flutter away.

Most of the problems with “Whisper House” are baked into the script, but director Ed Rutherford’s staging comes with a few limitations of its own. Scenic designer Nikolaj Sorensen can’t do much to suggest a lighthouse in the Athenaeum’s low-ceilinged second-floor studio. And the boyish Anderson is so miscast as the blustery lawman that you suspect he was hired more for his ability to double as trumpet player in the six-piece band.

Ultimately, though, the fog that “Whisper House” can’t cut through comes down to its creators and their odd mismatch of tones. Any musical that tries to strike an optimistic closing note, even as a noble character is led off to an internment camp, is steering a very confusing course.

Kris Vire is a local freelance writer.

Evan Hanover