GrooveLily's Striking 12: Valerie's Blog #1

STRIKING 12: A New GrooveLily Musical
Valerie's Blog #1 – 'How It All Happened'
By Valerie Vigoda 

BroadwayWorld is proud to bring you a new six-part series of blog entries written by Valerie Vigoda of GrooveLily, the band that "crosses the boundaries laid down by words like rock, folk, jazz and pop."  GrooveLily's 'Striking 12,' a Christmas musical about a 'Grumpy Guy' whose life in transformed by an 'incandescent salesgirl,' will begin performances at the Daryl Roth Theatre on November 6th toward a November 12th opening.  It is co-written by GrooveLily's Vigoda and Brendan Milburn (both of whom will also appear in the show) and Tony Award-winner Rachel Sheinkin.

Hello BroadwayWorld! It is an honor to be invited to share my thoughts with you here, in my first attempt at blogging. Our musical "Striking 12" opens Off-Broadway in 19 days (first preview November 6, and official opening day November 12) - and I'll be documenting the process for you as well as I can.

Where to begin? I guess I should tell you a little bit about us - meaning my band GrooveLily, and our collaborators in creating this piece. We are a three-piece rock band, with me on six-string electric violin, Brendan on keyboards and Gene on drums - plus we all sing. Basically we try to make as much sound as possible with only three people. We've spent quite a few years on the road, touring in our van as an indie band...playing colleges, universities, concert series, clubs, festivals, performing arts centers, you name it. At the height of our traveling, we were playing 150 shows a year, a different city every night.

The holiday season was always a time when the GrooveLily gig schedule would slow down dramatically; so when I was offered the chance to tour as concertmistress of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra (a hard rock Christmas Spectacular type of show, lots of dry ice and arena lights and bombastic guitar-heavy versions of familiar carols, with a heartwarming holiday story told by a deep-voiced narrator), I said yes. I had a great time strutting around big stages for thousands of screaming TSO fans in late 2001, being the hard-rock electric violin gal.

Brendan came to the show at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco (his hometown), got very inspired and had a bright idea: why don't we do our OWN holiday show? We could weave together a good story with some new original music, make it a secular show rather than a Christmas-specific one, and book more gigs during the holidays. The incredible success of the TSO made it very clear that people are eager to find alternatives to the usual Nutcracker/Christmas Carol holiday fare. 
 
A month later (January 2002) we had the good fortune A) to be introduced to the fabulous playwright and librettist Rachel Sheinkin, and B) to meet the amazing director Ted Sperling. Rachel was looking for collaborators, and Ted had just accepted a position as Associate Artistic Director of the Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia. Suddenly, he had a theatrical season to fill, and he had to do it right away. Brendan mentioned his idea of a GrooveLily holiday show, and Ted said "Great - you're booked - can you be ready to open in November?"

And there we were, not only with some GrooveLily gigs during the holidays, but also with what we considered the ultimate luxury - a gig in ONE PLACE where we could stay put for several weeks, not set up and break down our equipment every night, and not drive the van. Why hadn't we thought of this before?

Now all we had to do was *write* the thing. 
 
Thus began a hectic and wonderful year of creating the first draft of "Striking 12." We had the aforementioned 150 shows to play...so we spent a lot of time on cell phones with Rachel as we drove. Rachel listened to our CD "Little Light," and the title track made her think of "The Little Match Girl" by Hans Christian Andersen; this turned out to be the perfect story for us, because it is set on New Year's Eve, the non-Christmas holiday we were looking for. Although "The Little Match Girl" is a very sad story, we didn't want to write a depressing show: we decided to incorporate contemporary characters, in addition to us playing ourselves, as frames around the original story, and this conceit turned out well, we think. (For example, Brendan plays the Grumpy Guy who doesn't want to go out on New Year's Eve, but instead stays home reading. Those of you who know Brendan at all will recognize a bit of him in this character! 
 
Similarly, Gene plays (among other roles) the Little Match Girl's dead Jewish grandmother. It's almost as if the part were written for him.
 
We premiered "Striking 12" at the Prince in 2002; and in each subsequent year since then, we've done it again, rewriting and adding and changing each time. It's my first experience writing theater - and I had always been astonished at the number of years a lot of pieces spend being developed. Not any more; now I get it. As a writer, you're never completely satisfied with the way it all holds together...and it's hard to keep from tweaking. 
 
In 2003, we did the show at the Old Globe in San Diego; in 2004, at TheatreWorks Palo Alto; and in 2005, at Ars Nova, a lovely intimate venue in NYC. Over these past years, GrooveLily has become more and more a band that does theater; interestingly, it's become our niche, and we've never been happier. We are now writing a wide variety of pieces: from Shakespeare ("A Midsummer Night's Dream" for McCarter Theatre/Paper Mill Playhouse), to Sleeping Beauty ("Sleeping Beauty Wakes," for Deaf West/Center Theatre Group - with Rachel again), to an autobiographical show about our travels in a used RV ("Wheelhouse").

We've gotten addicted to theater - to the larger stories we get to tell, to the lifestyle of being stably in one place instead of nomads as we were for so long...(and we are all 3 in the midst of starting families/having kids, which works a lot better when you're not in a different hotel every night)...and so it is a dream come true for us to be opening "Striking 12" Off-Broadway this year. We are absolutely thrilled to be home for the holidays. 
 
Rehearsals start Monday, and I can't wait to tell you all about them. 
 
 
A classically-trained musician, Princeton University honors graduate, and former Army lieutenant, Valerie Vigoda is the founding member of GrooveLily. She has toured the world with Cyndi Lauper, Joe Jackson and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. She founded GrooveLily in 1994, with a critically-acclaimed CD called "Inhabit My Heart." She is the winner of a 2006 Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation Award for excellence in writing for the theater, along with her longtime collaborator, fellow band member and husband, Brendan Milburn.