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Pomona College Magazine is published three times a year by Pomona College
550 N. College Ave, Claremont, CA 91711
Online Editor: Mark Kendall
For editorial matters:
Editor: Mark Wood
Phone: (909) 621-8158
Fax: (909) 621-8203
PCM Editorial Guidelines
Contact Alumni Records for changes of address, class notes, or notice
of births or deaths.
Phone: (909) 621-8635
Fax: (909) 621-8535
Email: alumni@pomona.edu
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Once Upon a Musical
Husband-and-wife team Brendan Milburn '93 and Valerie Vigoda stage
musical fairy tales with hip modern day twists. Who else would stick
Sleeping Beauty in a sleep disorder clinic?
By Sneha Abraham
Brendan Milburn ’93 and his wife Valerie Vigoda have been singing
stories for a long time as two-thirds of the pop-rock-jazz-folk ensemble
GrooveLily.
“Songs are stories in their own right,
says Milburn. But of late they’re
singing—and signing—fairy tales
In May, Milburn, Vigoda and their
writing partner, Tony Award-winner
Rachel Sheinkin, wrapped up Sleeping
Beauty Wakes, their musical twist on the
Grimms’ tale—featuring performance
by both deaf and hearing actors for both
deaf and hearing audiences
In the play, a lovely but impetuous
adolescent collides with her father’s protective
heart and a modern-day sleep
clinic full of insomniacs.
Think Sleeping
Beauty meets Shaun of the Dead in a
heartwarming, musical sort of way.
Complete with electric violin.
Sleeping Beauty Wakes was warmly
received at Culver City’s Kirk Douglas
Theater, praised by many critics—“a
beguiling tour de force,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter,—and
became the first show at the theatre to have an extended run.
 But it’s not just L.A. Before Sleeping Beauty, the couple
already had taken an impressive bite out of the Big Apple.
Striking 12 was their first foray into musical theatre, and their
retelling of Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Match Girl was an
off-Broadway hit in December of 2006. Milburn played a cranky
New Yorker set on spending New Year’s Eve home alone, until
he meets a quirky door-to-door saleswoman (played by Vigoda),
who is hawking special light bulbs designed to ward off seasonal
affective disorder.
No less than The New York Times deemed it “thoroughly
winning,” and crowed, “this modest show is more artfully crafted
and engaging than virtually all the standard-mold musicals
coming our way these days.”
Playing. Singing. Acting. Everything. Milburn and Vigoda
multi-task throughout their productions. What does it feel like
during a show?
“Like my arteries are bursting in my hand,” Milburn says.
These forays into musical theatre require a hyperactive intensity
while on stage, but they sprang from a dormant period on GrooveLily’s calendar.
Gigs were hard to come by in the November to January season
of 2000 and 2001. So Vigoda played concertmistress for the
Trans-Siberian Orchestra, a multi-platinum-selling heavy metal
winter concert. Milburn saw the show and knew that with his
training in musicals they could create a concert around a story,
too. So once upon a time, a secular winter concert was born in
the form of Striking 12. Five years would pass before the idea
came alive on stage at New York’s Daryl Roth Theatre.
“It wasn’t quite a flying leap as you can see,” Milburn said.
“It was more of a gradual edging laterally onto a different diving
board over a different swimming pool filled with different sharks
and boulders. We just got lucky.”
For Milburn this is all coming
full circle—during his Pomona
College days he played piano for
Theatre Professor Betty Bernhard’s
production of the Old West musical
Gold Dust. Milburn also wrote the
music and lyrics for Seaver Theatre’s
first show, It’s Just a Stage.
As a writing duo, Milburn tends
to play music man and Vigoda pens
lyrics. Writing a song is a relatively
quick process for them, they say.
“We generally know when it’s
time to sing,” Milburn adds.
When it comes time to adapting
a play or story into a musical,
Milburn says he has a habit of entering
into the narrative himself.
“I can’t help seeing myself or
people I know in these stories, and I
consciously or unconsciously tailor what I write to jive with
what I’ve experienced. So I’m all over the king in Sleeping
Beauty, the Man Who’s Had Enough in Striking 12, Charles in
Infinite Ache … Really compelling stories make you see yourself
in them, whether it be a glamorous, heroic aspect, or a dark,
scaly underbelly.”
Rachel Sheinkin, their writing partner, has learned a lot from
watching Milburn and Vigoda collaborate—and she’s been challenged
along the way. “If they say ‘I like that’ it means they’re
being supportive but it’s not good enough yet— you have to
keep going ’til you get real enthusiasm,” Sheinkin said. “But
they are generous with their enthusiasm when they feel it.”
And, Sheinkin adds, “they just may have the fiercest work
ethic I’ve ever seen.”
The pair needed every scrap of that work ethic as they undertook
their ambitious effort to put on Sleeping Beauty Wakes.
Deaf West Theatre in North Hollywood, billed as “the first professional
resident Sign Language Theatre west of the
Mississippi,” issued the commission in January 2006. Milburn, Vigoda and Sheinkin hammered out a story. Then came a six-week
introduction course to American Sign Language.
“It was tough,” Milburn says. “It was like being dropped
into modern-day Athens after having read The Iliad in translation.
But it was terribly rewarding to become barely conversant
with our fellow cast members, and they were so kind and patient
with us.”
Ancient Greek and The Iliad aside, there really was the issue
of “lost-in-translation.” Neither Milburn nor Vigoda realized
the sheer complexity of a bilingual show. It slowed the pace of
everything. “Jokes were half-tempo,” Vigoda says.
Their burning question: would it connect?
“You never know if something’s going to work with an audience,” says Milburn.
It seemed to work.
“We have sniffles at the end and lots of laughter through the
middle of it,” Milburn says. They also have lots of fan e-mails
and brand-new MySpace friends.
By and large, Milburn says, the audience feedback was very
positive. The hearing audience members wanted the soundtrack—
which is always good, he says. “They found that the
combination of signing and speech and singing was more than
the sum of its parts,” Milburn explains. “A beautiful love song
was made more beautiful and lovely by virtue of the ‘communication
choreography’ that they were seeing.”
Reactions from deaf audience members were mixed. Milburn
heard from three camps: 1) the wildly appreciative; 2) the perplexed;
and 3) the dismissive and annoyed. “The third camp was
small but vocal,” he says. “And I was surprised and not a little
hurt at how quickly they dismissed our hard work.”
But somebody’s taking note. Next up they’re scoring a spring
2008 production of Toy Story for the cruise ship Disney Wonder.
After eking out a living on the road as musicians with 150
shows per year, this feels stable. They’ve come a long way from
living out of their RV (which then broke and sat useless for a
good nine months. “Worst mistake ever,” Vigoda says.), playing
house concerts and crashing on friends’ couches. “The rice and
beans days,” Milburn calls them.
GrooveLily was a successful indie band, but the lifestyle took
its toll. They were approaching burnout, Vigoda says, and talking
about starting a family. Visions of their baby sleeping in a
guitar case were not pleasant ones.
“Not what we wanted,” they both say.
Now spending four weeks in the same hotel room is the
height of luxury for them, Vigoda says.
When Milburn and Vigoda aren’t singing stories they’re
often reading them. Thanks to their two-year-old son, Mose,
their current-reading stack contains the works of Byron Barton
(“including such magnificent epics of pre-preschool literature as
Trains, Machines at Work, and Trucks”), Rev. W. Awdry (including
Thomas the Tank Engine and Milburn’s personal favorite,
Toby the Tram Engine) and Hug by Jez Alborough.
“Seriously,” Milburn says. “This is what I read now.” |
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