Husband-and-wife team Brendan Milburn and Valerie Vigoda follow up the success of Striking 12 with a new two-person musical, Long Story Short, a TheatreWorks production now at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto.
The last time we got into the GrooveLily groove was about four years ago when TheatreWorks produced the group’s terrific holiday show/concert, Striking 12, a modern-day retelling of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Matchgirl.
GrooveLily’s Brendan Milburn and Valerie Vigoda, who also happen to be husband and wife, are back at TheatreWorks with a new show, but they will not be onstage singing and playing the way they were in Striking 12.
For Long Story Short Milburn and Vigoda provide music, lyrics and book (based on a play by David Schulner) for a two-person musical about Charles and Hope, an unlikely couple – he’s a Jewish man from New York, she’s an Asian-American woman from Los Angeles – and their relationship through the decades.
The show is a co-production with City Theatre in Pittsburgh and comes to Palo Alto’s Lucie Stern Theatre after a successful run there.
One advantage of a co-production is two opening nights and some space in between to make some changes if necessary.
“We discovered things about the show you can only find out about in front of an audience,” Milburn says. “During previews in Pittsburgh, we saw several things we thought were hilarious get no reaction. And several things we thought were boring filler got guffawing, side-splitting laughter. Several songs we though were so-so got a huge reaction. We feel really blessed to be given the chance to do some re-writes between the close of the Pittsburgh run and the opening of the TheatreWorks run.”
During the run of Striking 12, Milburn and Vigoda forged a strong relationship with TheatreWorks and have been intimately involved with its new works program, where “Long Story Short” saw a fair amount of development.
“We were here a little under a year ago as part of the TheatreWorks writers’ retreat, and that was an incredibly fruitful time for us with new songs and new writing,” Vigoda explains. “That week alone I think we wrote and tossed a couple songs. It really helped us in the process of writing this.”
The actual writing of the show began in 2006 – after being commissioned by City Theatre — and by most new musical theater standards, the show was created incredibly quickly. Long Story Short also benefited from the development process in Pittsburgh, where the show was part of its Momentum Festival.
Milburn discovered Schulner’s play, An Infinite Ache, in a pile of scripts City Theatre had sent him with a goal of collaborating on a new musical with an established playwright. (The show stars Pearl Sun as Hope and Ben Evans as Charles, seen at right, photo by Suellen Fitzsimmons)
“As soon as I read the script, I knew this was the piece we could turn into a musical,” Milburn says. “What appealed to me first was the gimmick – the story actually has too much heart to call it a gimmick – but it’s the leaping forward in time without giving the audience any warning that a leap has happened, thus forcing the audience to keep up with the play. It’s a little confusing, but there’s always enough context to get what’s going on. You feel like you’re being taken for a very fast, very exciting roller coaster ride. It’s a little like science fiction without the science fiction – it’s a domestic time-travel story.”
Prior to writing this show, Vigoda and Milburn had been content writing for their band and performing. But lives change. The couple has a 3-year-old son, and Vigoda says the notion of creating a show and sending it out into the world without having to be in it has its appeal.
There are plenty of other irons in the creative fire for Milburn and Vigoda. They’ve written a musical version of the Disney-Pixar movie Toy Story for the Disney Cruise Line that is now being adapted to fill the stage of the Hyperion Theatre in Disney’s California Adventure, the sister park to Disneyland in Anaheim.
They’re also working on another musical for TheatreWorks: Ernest Shackleton Loves Me. The show began life as a one-woman show for Vigoda (who sings and plays a mean electric violin), and it’s about one modern-day woman’s special night in the company of the great arctic explorer. If all goes well, there’ll be a reading of that new show next June.
As for the couple’s band, GrooveLily (which also features Gene Lewin on drums), they report they’re in the midst of recording the next album, which is based on a show they created for Deaf West Theatre: Sleeping Beauty Wakes, which was performed bilingually, in American Sign Language and spoken English.
They say to look for the album in early 2009.
Though Milburn and Vigoda won’t be on stage in Long Story Short, their fans can hear them perform the songs from the show on their Web site: http://www.groovelily.com/store/songs/
And they’ll perform the holiday show Striking 12 for one night only, Dec. 15, at the Little Fox in Redwood City. Visit http://www.foxdream.com/foxdream/shopexd.asp?id=1357&bc=no for information.
Long Story Short previews Wednesday, Dec. 3-5, opens Saturday, Dec. 6 and continues through Dec. 28 at the Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. Tickets are $27-$65. Call 650-903-6000 or visit www.theatreworks.org.
Friday night at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center, Broadway composer Stephen Schwartz diverged from his set list after opening his show, Stephen Schwartz and Friends, with the sweet “Chanson” from his 1976 show The Baker’s Wife.
The expertly chosen, inspirational song, which echoes Obama’s rally cry of “Yes we can!” was slightly out of Schwartz’s range, but when the spirit moves you, notes hardly matter.
For Callaway, there were two great moments: in the sadly sweet “Lion Tamer” (from 1974’s The Magic Show) and her bravura version of “Meadowlark” from The Baker’s Wife, which is a song she has been singing for years and sings just about better than anybody else. She also joined forces with Coulter on the “love medley” with Callaway taking the lead on “As Long As You’re Mine” from Wicked and Coulter on “In Whatever Time We Have” from Children of Eden.
In addition to singing some heartfelt solos – “Forgiveness’ Embrace” from his 2002 album Uncharted Territories and “For Good,” the emotional finale of Wicked – Schwartz offered a master class in songwriting for musicals by taking us through the evolution of “The Wizard and I,” the young witch’s cris de coeur from Wicked.
You’ve got a story that goes nowhere, a primary romantic couple that hits a few road blocks but ends up together, a cap-tossing graduation scene and the must unrealistic school musical of all time (in Grease 2 it involves the wretchedly wonderful production number “Girl for All Seasons”). You’ve also got a leading man in a salvage yard (in Grease 2, Maxwell Caulfield is building the ultimate chick-magnet motorcycle) and a song that echoes one of the worst numbers ever: “Who’s That Guy?” (in HSM3 the line occurs during a paean to prom night called “A Night to Remember,” which also happens to be the name of a movie about the Titanic, but I digress).
Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens are as appealing as ever, though Efron’s charisma pretty much blows pretty Vanessa off the screen. Ashley Tisdale, with her sassy new nose, has fun with her ultra-bitchy character, Sharpay, though on the big screen it becomes quite apparent that Ms. Tisdale is not a great actress, nor does she have a whole lot of comic flair. Lucas Grabeel (right) as Sharpay’s, twin, Ryan, is mostly consigned to reaction shots as Sharpay flounces about, flipping her extensions and making the most of her cutie cute outfits. I’m a little sorry Ryan doesn’t get to fully come out of the closet and take a boy to prom. Instead he takes Kelsi(Olesya Rulin), the “composer” of the school shows. I’m not sure if that means Kelsi is a budding lesbian and the two recognize each other through the golden high school haze or Kelsi is doomed to a life of fag haggery. I’m hoping for the former. For the best analysis of HSM3 as gay metaphor, check out Prince Gomolvilas’ Bamboo Nation report 
, the remake of which happens to be a future Efron project. Sure Efron’s got the goods, but Bleu matches him in the charisma department, and of all the HSM stable other than Efron, this is the guy to watch.
The Walt Disney Company never has handled success very well. Surprisingly, abundance of imagination can lead to a hit, then absence of imagination can kill it dead.
There’s a scene of WALL-E trying to dance with a hubcap for a hat that is priceless. But that’s just a prelude to the robot’s actual chance to fall in love with EVE, a slick droid sent down from the mother ship (where all the too-fat humans are carried on floating chairs, eyes glued to the screens in front of their faces). Neither of the ‘bots really speaks, so the true expression of their feelings (again, why these robots have developed feelings is mysterious, but intriguing) is by touching, or holding hands, just like Irene and Cornelius do in Hello, Dolly!
And Herman, whose music is so integral to one of the best movies of the year (animated or otherwise), is getting the kind of exposure he deserves. He told the Associated Press: “I’m still blown away by the fact that two songs of mine that are close to 50 years old have been used as the underpinning of the movie.”
For the first time, there will be pre-ceremony Tony Concert chock full of juicy musical numbers from all the nominated shows. In the Bay Area the concert will be at 1 p.m. Sunday, June 15 on KPIX-TV. Mario Lopez (currently playing Zach in A Chorus Line) hosts, and we’ll see numbers from 10 musicals: A Catered Affair, Cry-Baby, Grease, Gypsy, In The Heights, Passing Strange, South Pacific, Sunday in the Park with George, The Little Mermaid and Xanadu—on stage at the Allen Room at Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, with its spectacular, floor-to-ceiling views of Central Park South visible to viewers of the telecast. 
In his highly enjoyable book How Does the Show Go On? An Introduction to the Theater (Disney Editions, $19.95), Thomas Schumacher recounts, in no particular order, all the jobs he’s had in his life, from childhood in San Mateo to the top of the heap as president of Disney Theatrical Productions.
The showman in Schumacher, 50, also came out during the event. He brought a trunk of props from various Disney shows — a funny wig from Mary Poppins (made, as he told the kids, from “fur off a yak’s butt,” which you can bet got a laugh), a baby doll from Tarzan that “leaked” water on a volunteer from the audience, and a shattering vase from Poppins.
After all he’s accomplished in his career, Schumacher finally got around to writing a book, the kind of book, he says, he would have been crazy about when he was a theater-hungry kid.
Now that Little Mermaid is up and running (after an opening delayed by the stagehands’ strike), Schumacher is turning his attention to other Disney Theatrical projects.