GrooveLily members tell a `Long Story Short'

December 2, 2:04 PMSF Theater ExaminerChad Jones

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Pearl Sun is Hope and Ben Evans
is Charles in Brendan Milburn and
Valerie Vigoda's musical "Long
Story Short" at the Lucie Stern
Theatre in Palo Alto. Photo by
Suellen Fitzsimmons.

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.

“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.