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Hip for the holidays: Brendan Milburn '93's alternative
musical Striking 12 hits the big-time in New
York.
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In his hit musical
Striking 12,
currently playing off-Broadway, Brendan Milburn ’93 is a
cranky, burned-out New Yorker determined to spend New Year’s
Eve home alone. His plans for a solitary evening are
foiled when he meets a quirky door-to-door saleswoman
(played by Milburn’s real-life spouse, Valerie Vigoda), who is
hawking special light bulbs designed to ward
off seasonal affective disorder.
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Valerie Vigoda and Brendan Milburn '93 star in
Striking 12. |
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The
show itself seems to be having a similar mood-elevating effect on
audiences and critics. Though Striking 12 features
only three performers – Milburn, Vigoda and Gene Lewin – and
the sparest of sets, the New York Times
raved that “this modest show is more artfully crafted
and engaging than virtually all the standard-mold musicals
coming our way these days.” Drawing in part on Hans
Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl, the
musical also offers a “terrific” score and lyrics “alive
with wit and humor,” writes reviewer Charles Isherwood.
With notices like that, Milburn rarely spends a night home
alone these days. Milburn (vocals and keyboard), Vigoda
(vocals and electric violin) and drummer Lewin form the
rock-folk-jazz-pop trio
GrooveLily.
Along with their musical shows across the nation,
they write and perform in their own unique form of musical
theatre of which Striking 12 is typical. That show’s
nightly run at New York’s Daryl Roth Theatre ends,
fittingly, on Dec. 31.
In February, the trio will be arriving in Los Angeles to
ramp up for another show they’ve been co-writing with Rachel
Sheinkin, the Tony winner who they also teamed up with for
Striking 12.
Sleeping Beauty
Wakes is a
retelling of the fairy tale, set at a modern-day sleep
disorder clinic. This joint production of Deaf West Theatre
and the Center Theatre Group will feature deaf and hearing
actors on stage, with GrooveLily as the live band providing
voices to some of the parts played by deaf actors. “It's
pretty wild and wonderful,’’ Milburn says of the show opening March
31.
Wild and wonderful is an apt description of Milburn’s career
so far. He wrote his first musical as a high-school project,
and he came to Pomona “with the vague idea of branching out
academically--physics, philosophy, classics.’’ But then came
an opportunity to play piano for
Theatre Professor Betty
Bernhard’s production of the Old West musical Gold
Dust.
“I never looked back,” he says. In fact, Milburn wound up
writing the music and lyrics for the first show, It’s
Just a Stage, performed in Pomona’s then-new Seaver
Theatre. “There was something kind of magical about the
‘let’s put on a show despite all setbacks’ attitude among
the cast and crew,” he says. “And I can honestly say that
I’ve never had quite so much fun in the theatre before or
since.”
The New York Times calls Striking 12
"thoroughly winning." |
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He met Vigoda, a Princeton grad, while he was playing piano
in bars to pay his way through grad school at New York
University. Some friends came to see him one night and took
him out afterward to see this woman with a violin play at a
club. “I was hooked after the first song,” he says. “We
started writing together a week later, and we haven’t
stopped writing together since.”
He
joined the Valerie Vigoda Band, which eventually slimmed
down from seven to three members and became GrooveLily.
Along the way, in 1998, Milburn and Vigoda wed.
The idea for Striking 12 developed in 2001.
GrooveLily had always had trouble lining up gigs in the lean
November-to-January season, and Vigoda took a job as the
concertmistress for the Tran-Siberian Orchestra, a
multi-platinum-selling rock opera/holiday concert tour.
Milburn got to thinking his trio could do this, too – make a
concert with a story they could tour at all the venues
they’d already played.
Friends put them in touch with writer Sheinkin (who won to
the 2005 Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for The 25th
Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) and she liked the
idea of doing a show for a rock band. She hit upon Vigoda's
song "Little Light" from GrooveLily’s 2000 album of the same
name, and it made her think of Hans Christian Andersen's
The Little Match Girl.
Then Director Ted Sperling saw a GrooveLily showcase, asked them if they had any musicals
they were working on, and booked Striking 12 at the
Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia before they had even
started writing. “We wrote like mad, much of it while
driving around the country,” says Milburn, noting that
GrooveLily played 150 shows that year.
About the writing process: It was either Milburn or Vigoda in the front seat of the van, going back and forth
over lyrics, with Sheinkin participating by speaker phone.
Or it was Milburn with the Casio on his lap and Sheinkin and
Vigoda gathered around in their tiny living room every
Tuesday night. “We were under tremendous time pressure for
the original production, and if we didn't have a new scene
and song once a week, we knew we would be behind,” says
Milburn.
After the 2002 Philadelphia run, the band went on to perform
Striking 12 at
San Diego's Old Globe, TheatreWorks Palo Alto and Ars Nova,
a small off-off Broadway venue in New York City. Each season, the GrooveLily trio has
refined and added new touches to the production.
Milburn and Vigoda find working, writing and singing
together is great fun – most of the time. But the inevitable
career low points can be rough when both partners are fully
immersed in the same work. Milburn says that both the band
and their marriage were strained in 2001-2002 as they toured
the U.S. and Canada in a used RV and were left
“couch-hopping” after their vehicle broke down and they
couldn’t afford to repair it.
Today, though, the pair are a
bit more settled, raising their 14-month-old son, and living
in a Brooklyn townhouse when not on the road. One of the
upsides of their unusual career is that they can
revel together in the artistic high points. As Milburn
puts it: “Waking up and opening the paper to find that the
New York Times has given your show an unqualified rave is
something so sweet and uncertain and delicious--I am so glad
to share it.”
More about:
Pomona's Music
Department
Pomona's Theatre
and Dance Department |
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