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!

The venerable old building itself

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.

Here’s the video in all its (rather long) glory — our segment is at about 10:10:

Paul’s 40th Birthday Video from Paul and Storm on Vimeo.

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.

Why?

Well, for one thing, perhaps an autobographical show about the worst 22 months of our life is not the most commercial idea. One of the nice things about Striking 12 is that it’s licensable–other people can do it, and the large-cast version of the show is actually better than the 3-person version, in my humble opinion. But with Wheelhouse, we’re pretty much the only people who can do it. Because it’s about us.

No licensing possibilities equals little if any interest from potential commercial theater producers. So we put it on the side burner and left it there for YEARS AND YEARS.

The thing is, we can’t stop thinking about it–not a week goes by when I don’t play some of the demos or live recordings in my itunes library and think think think think think.

Every time we get together to rehearse or sound check before a concert, we play songs from Wheelhouse.

Well, it’s time. We live on separate coasts, we are wildly busy with other stuff, but we’re just going to do it. Gene’s flying out later this year to spend five days finishing the writing with me and Val, and then we’re going to record it cheaply at our respective homes, and put the darned thing out. And tour it. And make a powerpoint presentation. Seriously.

More news soon.

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.

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.

What a trip this life is turning out to be.

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).

Here are dates and links to buy tickets:

STRIKING 12 at Arena Stage (Crystal City location): Dec 2-4, 6, 10-13

STRIKING 12 at Portsmouth Music Hall (Portsmouth, NH): Dec 5

STRIKING 12 at Merkin Hall @ Kaufman Center (New York, NY): Dec 31

Check out Val’s Arena Stage blog post!

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.

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.)