Striking 12 Overture (2007) – in HD from BigFan007 on Vimeo.
“It’s a concert with a story where the actors are the band,” explains Ben Milburn, the actor/pianist in that band.
That’s the main thing you need to know to prepare for Striking 12, which plays two shows (4 p.m. & 7 p.m.) at Westport Country Playhouse on Saturday, Dec. 10. Don’t worry about how creepy the show’s inspiration, The Little Match Girl, is; the band has already done the worrying for you, and channelled it into a peppy holiday show about rebirth and renewal in dark times.
Striking 12 is the children’s show that asks the musical question (as Milburn puts it): “How can anybody think this would be a story for children?” The energetic, economical, multi-faceted musical has an audacity and skeptical streak that befits its source material, a dire tale from that master of misfortune Hans Christian Andersen.
Striking 12 takes a new attitude towards Andersen’s dark tale of a freezing child, retelling it while analyzing it, creating a mild modern corollary with the encounter between a mild-mannered man who needs a date for New Year’s Eve and the environmentalist who turns up at his doorstep selling eco-friendly light bulbs.
Groovelily used to play 150 shows a year—“mostly on the folk circuit. We peaked in 2002,” Milburn says, without the band ever being able to make a steady living.
Electric violinist Valerie Vigoda, who’s married to bandmate Milburn, got a regular gig touring with Cyndi Lauper, which helped make ends meet.
“We were writing songs together before we were dating,” Milburn says of his relationship with Vigoda. They met in 1994, and got married in ’98. What really changed things for the couple was when they became parents. Groovelily’s other member, Gene Lewin is also a family man.
A light went off in their heads when, Valerie went on the road with the Tran-Siberian Orchestra, the prog-rock ensemble whose reputation rests on its bombastic Christmas concerts. Groovelily set out to write their own seasonal show.
Milburn had gone to grad school at NYU in order to learn how to write musicals, and Groovelily had gotten used to being told their club material “sounds Broadway” and always admitted that “there are songs of ours with way too many words in them.” So a shift toward theater shows seemed only natural.
The met up with playwright Rachel Sheinkin, who was then “just a struggling graduate student like me,” Milburn says, and was still a couple years away from her Broadway success with the award-winning The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.
“Rachel heard Valerie’s song “Little Light” and said “That reminds me of The Little Match Girl,” Milburn explains. “So we went back to it, and were shocked by how relentlessly depressing that story is.” They merely took this as a challenge, noting how layered and meaningful and riveting the story also was. Becoming parents themselves gave them all the right filters for developing a family-friendly show that met their own standards of intelligence and depth.
“Having kids made us better songwriters,” Milburn says, but also made them less inclined to tour year-round. “Being in a van for what amounts to 200 days a year is very attractive when you’re 25 years old. I’m not 25 anymore,” Milburn says.
Striking 12 opened up whole new directions for Groovelily. The band’s done a slew of songs for Disney’s Tinkerbell cartoon film features. It’s also stayed in the theater realm; their latest stage work, Wheelhouse will premiere this spring at TheatreWorks of Silicon Valley, directed by the great Lisa Peterson.
Striking 12, meanwhile, has taken on a life of its own. It has been adapted so it can be performed by others—in some cases separating the music from the acting and allowing for a cast of up to a dozen. “We’re all for it,” Milburn says. “Some theaters are doing it every year now.” But Groovelily still takes the show out every year themselves. For the band, this is the time of year that they get together most often, so it’s always a fun holiday reunion.Their own rendition has changed a bit over the years, with songs added and subtracted. It’s been set for some time now. but still has a live spontaneity.
The trio has struck 12 in clubs and small theaters, but given the piece’s complexity and popularity, have come to prefer legit theater venues. Westport seems ideal for the show—the playhouse has a homey, traditional feel, and the stage isn’t so large that an audience would feel cheated by the work’s intentionally sparse staging.
“Because it doesn’t have very many props or much scenery, it leaves room for a lot of interpretation,” Milburn says. “It’s mostly theaters we do now, but there are times when it’s perfect for clubs, since, you know, it’s a three-piece rock band.”