San Francisco Chronicle
December 7, 2004
Sad winter tales told in happy key
By Robert Hurwitt, Chronicle Theater Critic
Sometimes the brightest gifts come in the strangest packages. One of this year’s more captivating new holiday shows is less the product of a theater company than of a jazzy rock trio called GrooveLily, and not so much a musical as a story threaded through a concert.
It isn’t even a Christmas story. “Striking 12″ — TheatreWorks’ holiday offering, which opened Saturday at Palo Alto’s Lucie Stern Theatre — is a New Year’s Eve tale of new beginnings. And it draws its joyously upbeat tone, humor and moral from one of the most downbeat seasonal tales of all, while remaining true to the original’s narrative and sentiment. Just in time for the 2005 Hans Christian Andersen bicentennial, GrooveLily has taken his “The Little Match Girl,” crossed it with a bit of “A Christmas Carol” and wrapped the result in some very bright tunes.
It isn’t the most likely source for such a buoyant entertainment. Over at San Jose Repertory, Sandra Tsing Loh opened her “Sugar Plum Fairy” Friday with a reference to “Match Girl” as a story for “freaky manic depressives.” GrooveLily songwriters and authors Valerie Vigoda (on six-string electric violin) and Brendan Milburn (her husband, on keyboards) and their co-author, playwright Rachel Sheinkin, don’t stint on Andersen’s sad tale of the little match seller dying, frozen on the street on New Year’s Eve.
They tell the story. They amplify it in song, with Vigoda wailing plaintive country blues that vividly embody the impoverished, abused little girl’s plight (“Matches for Sale,” “Can’t Go Home”) and deeply moving songs that dramatize her dying (“Visions in the Matchlight” and the stirring, searing “Caution to the Wind”). They bring it home in contemporary terms, Milburn singing a caustic “Say What?” that draws parallels to our callous disregard of the homeless around us — with trenchant echoes of the Depression (“Brother, I can’t spare the time”).
Yet “Striking” is far from grim. Andersen’s tale is framed within a modern New York one of young Scrooge-like Grumpy Guy (Milburn) — overworked, recently dumped and antisocial — the friend who keeps calling to get him to come to a New Year’s Eve party (drummer Gene Lewin) and the mysterious, beautiful woman (Vigoda) who shows up at his door selling “special full spectrum holiday light bulbs” (to fight Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD).
She’s the little light bulb girl, on hand to work a “Christmas Carol” transformation on Grumpy. The concert format of director Ted Sperling’s staging leavens the tone as well, distancing the central story’s gloom with the engaging personalities of the performers and the glow of Michael Gilliam’s lighting effects through the industrial windows of David Ledsinger’s loft set. The sharp, wry or just plain goofy humor of several songs — Vigoda’s super- fast “Sales Pitch,” an ensemble take on an awful party, Lewin’s comic analysis of Andersen (“Screwed-Up People Make Great Art”) — creates a buoyant tone.
All three performers are terrific instrumentalists, and Vigoda and Milburn are magnetic vocalists. The songs are delightful, an eclectic sequence of pop, rock, blues, country and show tunes drawing on influences as varied as Sondheim, bluegrass, Paul Simon, Irish folk and, I could swear, Joni Mitchell. There’s a bit of rap, too, crossed with old-fashioned patter song. The little match girl even shares some stage time with “The Little Drummer Boy.” And the lyrics are clever and intelligent, advancing or deepening the story as well as lacing it with humor.
It’s short, only an hour long. The second act is the equivalent of the additional material on a DVD. It’s the story of the band’s history and the making of “Striking,” illustrated with some of GrooveLily’s greatest hits and outtakes from previous versions of the show. TheatreWorks’ local premiere is also the unveiling of the third incarnation of “Striking.” It premiered at the Prince Music Theatre in Philadelphia in ’02, was reworked by the authors and Sperling at TheatreWorks’ New Works Festival last year and then played San Diego’s Old Globe.
It has been reworked again for this outing, as the performers engagingly illustrate in the second act. They created “Striking,” they say, to escape the strains of one-night-stand gigs and be able to settle in one place for the holidays. Their success in achieving that goal is a holiday gift for all of us.