We wish we could be there…for the first time ever, one of our songs is going to be performed at Carnegie Hall!
Méav Ni Mhaolchatha will be singing “Where the Sunbeams Play,” a closing-credits song for the movie TINKER BELL AND THE LOST TREASURE that we wrote with brilliant composer and great guy Joel McNeely. Méav will be performing as part of the “Celtic Music: A Saint Patrick’s Day Celebration” concert with the New York Pops.
Joel will be there, flying in for the event from LA; it’s a first for him as well. If you get to go to the concert, please tell us all about it!
Paul Sabourin, of Paul and Storm, just turned 40, and his wife threw him a surprise birthday party. We weren’t able to be there, but Storm invited us to participate in a mashup video where we would reminisce about something absolutely fictional in Paul’s history. Accordingly, we filmed a little something in the lobby of the hotel before the gig in College Station, TX, earlier this week.
The resulting video, below the break, is HI-larious, but much of it is, well, implications are made. Be forewarned.
Our segment is about how Paul used to play Sousaphone with our band. Storm got all photoshoppy and included these photos:
We can only say: Happy Birthday, Paul, and thank you, Storm! It’s clear that a lot of peculiar people love you a lot. Including us. Read More »
The wheel is spinning madly... (image courtesy of boardgamegeek.com)
Okay, we’re going to do it. We’re going to finish Wheelhouse. For real.
For those of you who don’t know anything about this, Wheelhouse is the 2nd GrooveLily concert-musical-hybrid thing, the one we started in 2004-5, after Striking 12 was proving to be a successful venture and we wanted to do more of the same.
TheatreWorks supported us with a writers’ retreat in January of 2005, and a workshop in their New Works Festival in April-May of 2005, and we made significant progress. Then we stopped.
Michael Kerker and the fine folks at ASCAP are presenting a week-long series of free performances at Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center Millennium Stage, and have given Val and Brendan the final one-hour concert slot: Saturday, February 13 at 6 PM. The two of us will be playing a bunch of songs from a bunch of projects, including some not usually featured in GrooveLily shows (like TOY STORY and LONG STORY SHORT). We’ll be fresh off a one-week workshop/reading of SLEEPING BEAUTY WAKES at McCarter Theatre in Princeton, NJ – so we’ll definitely be playing some of that music as well. Come join us! Free, no tickets or reservations required. The Grand Foyer will be transformed into a cabaret as tables and chairs are arranged in front of the stage and drinks from the Foyer bars are available.
The Kennedy Center
The series is called “Broadway: Today & Tomorrow” and runs Feb 8-13. It features some terrific emerging writers and performers: Peter Mills (Feb 8), Ryan Scott Oliver/Jay Armstrong Johnson/Alex Brightman/Lindsay Mendez (Feb 9), Steven Lutvak (Feb 10), Alan Schmuckler/Michael Mahler (Feb 11), Jordan Beck/Oliver May (Feb 12). We finish out the series on Feb 13.
One of the great byproducts of Striking 12 getting licensed here and there, is that occasionally we get to meet people who played us.
Two men who've had enough. The resemblance is astounding.
Val and I are trading off for two weeks, with one of us working on Toy Story The Musical on site in Anaheim while the other stays home and takes the kid to and from school–and today it’s my turn to be on site. And who do I run into but Brent Shindell, the guy who played “The Man Who’s Had Enough,” in other words, my character in Striking 12. He was in one of the very very few productions where they did it with THREE PEOPLE, just like me and Val and Gene.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the youtube videos–but Brent totally stepped up to the plate and played and sang all of my parts with great aplomb in Santa Barbara in 2008.
We posted some of 12-year-old Madison Kemp’s GrooveLily artwork a few months ago – and here’s her latest, just in time for the holidays. Thanks Madison!
Fighting the good fight against Seasonal Affective Disorder
Bringing STRIKING 12 to the chilly east coast: we are thrilled to be in residence at legendary Arena Stage in Washington, DC for two weeks (Dec 2-13); to return to the beautiful Portsmouth Music Hall in New Hampshire on December 5; and to continue our tradition of STRIKING 12 on New Year’s Eve in New York City (Merkin Hall at the Kaufman Center).
We’ll also be celebrating the re-release of our STRIKING 12 CD on PS Classics, including for the first time a special card to allow you to download the newer songs we’ve written for STRIKING 12 since that CD was released. These download cards will be available ONLY in person at the shows until 2010…so come on down to Arena Stage, Portsmouth Music Hall or Merkin Hall to pick yours up.
The cover of our first-ever song folio
In addition, we’ll have our first-ever official published song folio, hot off the presses and courtesy of Warner/Chappell and Alfred Music! Eight songs from STRIKING 12 are included, in full beautiful old-fashioned piano/vocal sheet music style. These have just become available online as well: check ‘em out here.
Back in 2006, when we spent the better part of six months working on writing and then rehearsing and then performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream with director Tina Landau, we made some lasting friendships with some of the actors. Notably, we had to collaborate closely with Jesse Nager (who sang so gloriously on our recording of “All Shall Be Well”) and Guy Adkins, who played Puck.
They’re both terrific guys, and both have a pretty wicked sense of humor, and one of the interesting aspects of doing the same show over and over again, 75 times, is that you start to imagine perverse interpretations of certain pieces of text or song.
The song “When I Dream” started off Act 2 – it was our comment on the fluid nature of the play and our invocation of a dreamworld. We like the song, but I have to admit that we tried to take the subject matter seriously–and one of the things about the video below is that Jesse and Guy act *completely serious* as they completely disembowel our song, and man, is it funny. (Note: some of the, well, gestures may be NSFW. Be forewarned.)
Also: note: this was off-stage. These people were doing this stuff backstage, in the dark, or in this stairwell you see below, and we didn’t get to actually see any of this until Adam Lobato, acrobatic fairy extraordinaire, filmed it for us with Val’s little camera. (I’m so glad he did.)
We just have to crow about this for a moment: this is a huge honor. It’s one of those awards for which you cannot apply; you simply receive a mysterious phone call out of the blue from Michael Kerker at ASCAP, saying “please post 6 of your songs online, a variety of work from different projects, and I can’t tell you anything else!” in a conspiratorial tone.
Then, a few days later, he calls back sounding much more jovial, and says we’ve been selected to receive the ASCAP Foundation Richard Rodgers New Horizons Award. We go online to find out more, and see that the list of past recipients reads like a Who’s Who of young writers working on Broadway: Adam Guettel, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jeanine Tesori, Larry O’Keefe, Andrew Lippa, John Bucchino, Michael Korie…we are unbelievably honored to be in this select company. The award was conceived of by Richard Rodgers’s daughter Mary Rodgers, whom we’ll get to meet at the awards ceremony December 9. Woohoo!!
