One Woman, One Explorer, One Very Long Night
There is a particular kind of musical that announces itself as something different before a single lyric lands. Ernest Shackleton Loves Me does this the moment its premise is stated: a sleep-deprived single mother and struggling musician, alone at her keyboard in the small hours, summons — via a malfunction in time itself — the ghost of the legendary Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, who has plenty of opinions about her life choices. The show is a two-hander in spirit but, in its signature form, a one-woman vehicle, with Valerie Vigoda performing the role of Kat alongside a projected or live Shackleton — a structure that mirrors exactly the kind of stripped-down, maximum-impact theatricality that has always defined GrooveLily's best work.
Written by Vigoda and her bandmate and husband Brendan Milburn with book writer Joe DiPietro — she on lyrics, he on music, as is their long-established division of creative labor — the show carries the band's DNA in every measure. The electric violin that Vigoda has wielded as her signature instrument since the group's earliest days is not a prop here; it is the engine of the story, Kat's livelihood and emotional vocabulary, the thing she plays to survive and the thing Shackleton cannot stop marveling at. The genre-blend that has always made GrooveLily hard to categorize — rock, folk, jazz, musical theatre, sometimes all within a single song — finds perhaps its most coherent dramatic home in this material. A song can be funny and then quietly devastating. A ballad can turn into something that sounds like it belongs on an arena stage. The show earns every one of those pivots because the writing trusts the audience.
The Band's Sensibility, Scaled Up
What makes Ernest Shackleton Loves Me a genuine extension of the GrooveLily project, rather than a side venture, is how faithfully it inherits the band's approach to the story-song. GrooveLily built their reputation on narrative — on songs that do not merely evoke a feeling but place a character in a situation and follow that character somewhere. Striking 12, the trio's New Year's Eve reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl, proved that the band could sustain a full theatrical arc. Sleeping Beauty Wakes pushed further into book-musical territory. Ernest Shackleton Loves Me takes the logical next step: a full evening built around a single protagonist whose interior life is rendered through music that is, by any honest measure, rock concert material played in a theatrical frame.
The Shackleton conceit is not merely a whimsical hook. Ernest Shackleton, the real historical figure, is celebrated for leading his crew to safety after the loss of the Endurance in 1915 — a story of persistence, improvisation, and refusing to abandon the people depending on you. Those themes map, with surprising precision and without heavy-handedness, onto a young mother trying to hold her creative life together at three in the morning. The show finds genuine pathos in that rhyme without over-explaining it, which is exactly the kind of dramaturgical confidence that distinguishes the best indie theatre writing.
“The show earns every one of those pivots because the writing trusts the audience.”
Vigoda's performance is, by all accounts of those who have seen it, extraordinary — not simply because she can sing and play and act simultaneously, but because the writing demands all three at once and she delivers them as a single unified thing. The electric violin is looped, layered, used to conjure atmosphere and rhythm and melody in real time, the way GrooveLily has always operated. The theatrical context does not domesticate the instrument; if anything, the storytelling gives it more charge.
For GrooveLily fans encountering Ernest Shackleton Loves Me for the first time, the gateway is immediate: this is your band, at full creative stretch, working in the form that suits them best. For listeners new to Vigoda and Milburn's work, it is an ideal entry point — a single evening that shows exactly what this pair can do when they follow a story all the way to the end. Bring your curiosity and your appetite for a ghost story that somehow feels like the most honest account of trying to make art in a difficult world that you have encountered in a long time.
The story, in brief
- 1994Valerie Vigoda Band founded; roots of what becomes GrooveLily
- 1915Loss of Shackleton's Endurance; the real historical event the show draws on
- post-Striking 12 eraVigoda and Milburn develop Ernest Shackleton Loves Me as their most ambitious theatrical work
GrooveLily is an unofficial fan tribute. We have no affiliation with the band, their management, or any label.