We’re up against the composers and songwriters of (among others) “The Penguins of Madagascar,” “The Amazing World of Gumball,” “Green Lantern the Animated Series,” and “Robot Chicken.” We love our lives.

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2011/aug/23/groovelily-wakes-sleeping-beauty/

It’s a pretty nice story of how we got where we are, and what we hope for the future.

http://www.playbill.com/news/article/152312-Rhinebeck-Writers-Retreat-to-Nurture-New-Musicals-by-Alex-Timbers-Michael-Friedman-GrooveLily

We’re in pretty august company, and it’s nice to read that Gaby Alter and Itamar Moses’ terrific piece “Nobody Loves You” is getting more work time at the Rhinebeck retreat AND is getting a production at the Old Globe. Val and I will be there with bells on–this show kicks butt.

This is tremendously exciting news, and we’re thrilled that the show is going to get another chance to come alive in front of new audiences as it slowly makes its way toward that most broad of ways.

There’s an official announcement from Theatreworks, and a mention on Playbill.com, but you can get the straight poop here. It’s happening.

It is our hope that we will actually have the CD (you remember, those round things that you make mp3′s out of) in hand in time to sell them in the lobby of the theatre. But no matter what, it’s all really happening.

Thank you to to everyone at Theatreworks for believing in us and this piece for so long.

Gene barely made it to the show; he was stuck like so many travelers, in the snow-related mishegoss that wreaked havoc on the east coast. Finally, he managed to get the last ticket on a first-class flight out of Philly, and it was delayed three times, which made it possible for him to actually get to Philly in time after waiting six hours for a train from Newark. He got the last cab from the train station before they closed it down; he was the last person through security before they closed *it* down. He arrived at the gate, ecstatic to have made it, definitely the only happy person in sight amidst the hundreds of weary travelers who had been waiting there all day…sat down in his first-class seat like the King of Siam, and promptly fell asleep.

The morning after our first STRIKING 12 show in Palo Alto, we got our groggy selves out of bed early and did a presentation of WHEELHOUSE for an audience of three TheatreWorks folks. We played about 8 songs–the ones we’ve rehearsed, the ones you’ve heard us do lately at our recent east coast gigs, plus one we’d never done before–and explained the rest. We walked them through the whole PowerPoint/charts and graphs concept, and led them from the optimistic beginnings through the absolute rock bottom to the sense of hope and possibility at the end. TheatreWorks helped us start developing WHEELHOUSE five years ago, and we are thrilled to have had the chance to show our progress to those who have been near and dear to the piece since its inception. We’re filled with excitement about this project (the upcoming album, which we hope to record this year, plus the show), and can’t wait to work on it together again soon.

http://valerievigoda.com/

Val is putting together a set of songs that she’ll perform alone with violin, harmony box, and Ableton Live running on a laptop. She’s creating loops of vocals and violin in real time, and turning them into new arrangements of old GrooveLily songs, plus guilty pleasures from the ’70s and ’80s re-imagined for her new box of audio crayons.

Val writes on her site:

This Ableton Live project is something entirely new and different for me … and I’m thrillingly excited about it. It’s incredibly empowering to be able to create an entire pop symphony of sound, in real time, onstage, alone.
And in case anyone is wondering: this does NOT mean GrooveLily is breaking up. My solo show is a completely different animal, and who knows, maybe I’ll open for us sometime.

Check out the videos and see what you think. If there’s a venue Val should be playing while you wait for the next GrooveLily show, please let us know. We just booked the very first Val solo gig, which will be March 17 in Des Moines, IA.

Gaby Alter co-wrote "Nobody Loves You," but We Loves Us some Gaby Alter.

Goodspeed Opera House invited me (Brendan), Val and Rachel Sheinkin to come up for two weeks and write whatever we wanted to write, as long as Val and I would consent to play a 45-minute concert at the end of the second week. We used this precious kid-free time (thanks for babysitting, Mom) to work 14-hour days like we used to back before we went and became parents. Much of the time was spent in fruitful exploration and rewrites of SLEEPING BEAUTY WAKES in preparation for its April 29 opening at McCarter Theatre in Princeton.

While we were there we saw three great, wildly different musicals in staged readings. ROOM 16, a hilarious, jazzy, so-wrong-it’s-right musical about G. Gordon Liddy and the Watergate Scandal; HELLO, MY BABY, Cheri Steinkellner and Georgia Stitt’s song-plugger/mistaken identity/cross-dressing turn-of-the-previous-century musical with a terrific score of public-domain tunes re-imagined in a memorable and delightful way; and NOBODY LOVES YOU, by Itamar Moses and Gaby Alter.

All three were good, but we had already *expected* the first two to be so, given how much we already knew of the pieces. The latter show was a wonderful surprise, and we need to crow about it for a moment.

At a cabaret the night before, Gaby and a crew of 8 actor/singers from the cast of the aforementioned NOBODY LOVES YOU sang his song “The Argument,” and Val, Rachel and I had one of those mutual, shared, jaw-dropping moments. It was just magical, and something in the songwriting, the performance, and the opening up of the song into a beautiful, choral explosion carried us away. We became card-carrying Gaby Alter fans at that moment.

The next day, Val and I had a chance to watch a final rehearsal run-through of Gaby and Itamar’s show. NOBODY LOVES YOU is a musical about reality television. This sounded (to me and Val) like a terrible idea. But it’s. Just. Great. So funny, so smart, so engaging, and terrific book, lyrics and music. If you have a chance to see this show in any form anywhere, run, don’t walk.