The Story Behind the Show
There is something quietly radical about setting a fairy tale in the present day and letting the princess figure out who she is before the happy ending — which is exactly the gambit at the heart of Sleeping Beauty Wakes, one of GrooveLily's most ambitious theatrical ventures. Brendan Milburn and Valerie Vigoda wrote the show as a fully realised book musical, rooted in the classic Sleeping Beauty frame but transplanted into a contemporary world where the "curse" reads as coma and the awakening is less a fairy-tale rescue than a young woman's disorienting re-entry into a life that moved on without her.
Aurora — the show's Sleeping Beauty — wakes in a hospital after years unconscious, to find herself surrounded by a world she doesn't recognise and people who have had to keep living. The prince who wakes her is not a storybook hero but a flawed, present-tense young man. The tension the show exploits — tenderly, and with genuine wit — is that waking up is the easy part. Figuring out what to do next is the real work. That is very much a GrooveLily preoccupation: the shows are always interested in the gap between the life you expected and the one you're actually in.
The Band's Theatrical Turn
By the time Sleeping Beauty Wakes reached audiences, GrooveLily had already demonstrated with Striking 12 that they could sustain an entire evening of theatre with three musicians and a stack of story-songs. That New Year's Eve show — a reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl — proved the model: lean staging, the trio playing live throughout, narrative carried in the music. Sleeping Beauty Wakes built on that template while reaching for something more conventionally theatrical in scope. It is a larger story, with more characters and a fuller emotional arc, and Milburn and Vigoda's score stretches accordingly.
Vigoda's electric violin sits at the centre of the sound in a way that remains consistently striking on stage. In a show about someone waking from a long sleep, the instrument's voice — capable of keening lament one moment and muscular rock drive the next — does expressive work that a conventional orchestra-pit sound could never quite replicate. Gene Lewin's drumming gives the score its propulsive backbone, and Milburn's keyboards and vocals anchor the harmonic world. The trio's genre-blend — rock, folk, jazz, musical-theatre — is not an affectation here; it serves the story's insistence on existing between the dreamlike and the real.
“That is very much a GrooveLily preoccupation: the shows are always interested in the gap between the life you expected and the one you're actually in.”
The 2009 Recording
The cast recording released in 2009 is the document most fans will know the show through, and it holds up. Cast recordings of indie-theatre work live or die on whether the material translates off the stage, and Sleeping Beauty Wakes largely succeeds because the songs are built to carry their own dramatic weight. Milburn's melodies have the directness of good pop songwriting married to the harmonic intelligence of jazz; Vigoda's lyrics do not flinch from emotional complexity. The recording captures the band's live energy well — this is music that was always meant to be felt physically as much as heard — and several tracks reward repeat listening in a way that suggests the score's theatrical ambitions are matched by its musical craftsmanship.
For listeners coming to GrooveLily through their rock-band catalogue, Sleeping Beauty Wakes is a persuasive argument for following the trio into the theatre. For theatre fans unfamiliar with the band, it is an equally persuasive argument for the other direction. That double-sidedness — the way the show and its recording speak fluently to two distinct audiences at once — is part of what makes it representative of everything GrooveLily do best. They have never accepted the idea that a rock electric violin and a fairy-tale libretto cannot occupy the same room. With Sleeping Beauty Wakes, they prove it at full volume.
GrooveLily is an unofficial fan tribute. We have no affiliation with the band, their management, or any label.