Strings Magazine “Encore” Page
August/September 2007
Dream A Little Dream
Sometimes fairy tales don’t come true-and that ain’t bad
by Laurence Vittes
The world premiere of Deaf West Theatre’s musical Sleeping Beauty Wakes created a sensation when it opened in April at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, California. It wasn’t only the high-energy, dazzlingly creative music and lyrics by Rachel Sheinkin and the husband-and-wife team of Brendan Milburn and Valerie Vigoda; it was the stunning brilliance of the cast, four of whom are deaf and who had their voices supplied either by other performers or by one of the three onstage musicians: violinist Vigoda, keyboardist Milburn, or percussionist Shannon Ford.
The show’s success confirmed that Vigoda, who once dreamed of becoming a classical virtuoso, has become a star in a very non-classical firmament.
After a morning performance of Beauty for students, Vigoda speaks lovingly of her grandfather, one of the last great Eastern European cantors, and her father, now retired, a professional jazz pianist who worked with Sting and Quincy Jones. Her father encouraged Vigoda’s transformation from a budding classical violinist into a multitalented performer with an arsenal that would have done justice to Petruchio’s troop of traveling players.
As a gauge of how wide her musical horizons have expanded, Vigoda describes the music she and Milburn wrote for Beauty as “Barenaked Ladies meet Steely Dan and Kurt Weill, with a touch of Joni Mitchell.”
After taking up the violin at age eight, Vigoda was soon on a serious classical track both as a violinist and a singer. After a few years, however, she hit a bump in the road while attending music camp. She balked at being required to play scales, exercises, and arpeggios for four hours every day. “I started to hate music,” she says.
Soon realizing that it was not music she hated, but “obsessive practicing,” Vigoda quickly moved on, musically speaking, especially since she “liked pop music as much as classical.” She wound up at Princeton University and, in her spare time, worked as a violinist, vocal coach, and assistant producer.
She took time off to attend the Peabody Institute for a year, took “great classes” at the Berklee College of Music in Boston with violinist Matt Glaser, head of the school’s alternative strings program, and worked in New York City with the legendary violinist and all-round musical guru Julie Lyonn Lieberman.
Vigoda’s conscious goal at that stage in her development was to “get out of the unthinking classical mind-set of allowing the music to move from the eyes-the written notes-to the fingers, bypassing the ears. “It still feels like I have to catch up,” she says, “maybe, in part, because I’m a very visual person.”
As Vigoda honed her musical and theatrical skills, her musical appetite continued to grow, as did her accomplishments. She toured the world with pop stars Cyndi Lauper and Joe Jackson, as well as the prog-rock band the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. In 1994, she formed GrooveLily, the genre-jumping New York City trio that blends rock, folk, jazz, and pop.
Eventually, she began spending less time in the GrooveLily touring van, and more time creating new projects with her bandmates. One result: Sleeping Beauty Wakes.
With a huge smile that never seems to leave her radiant face, she says, “I love what I’m doing. I get to write lyrics and music with collaborators whom I deeply admire, and with my husband whom I love, about stories I respect.”
Then she adds with a shrug and a grin, “I’m not sure I would be as happy if I had realized my original dreams.”