A Year with Frog and Toad - 11/23/08

At last – a family-friendly musical for the holidays (scenes near the end of the show take place at Christmas time) that doesn’t shout “God bless us, every one!” in your face every three and a half minutes. ATTENTION, PARENTS: if you want to

A. Encourage your children to see/love/get involved with live theatre,

B. Encourage them to read,

C. Have an entertaining evening for kids that doesn’t leave the adults regretting that they brought their eyeballs with them to the theatre,

hustle them over to Wheaton Drama to see A Year with Frog and Toad. Like You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, this is a deceptively simple musical with incredibly complex, jazzy harmonies.

Based on Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad books, a staple of many grade-school reading curricula, this charming show (book & lyrics by Willie Reale, music by Robert Reale) is an episodic journey of friendship where the title characters deal with everyday occurrences that assume epic importance – much like childhood does.

Carla Mutone’s direction is brisk, sure and hits all the sentimental moments without lingering on them until insulin is required. Tracy Adams’ choreography is ebullient and breezy. The musical direction of Ginger Stephens Terlep guides the actors through some of the toughest harmonies this side of Sondheim.

Steve Schroeder as the gentle, serene Frog and Chris Bruzzini as the dour, worry-wart Toad make a terrific team, complementing each other completely. Schroeder’s warm, assured voice blends nicely with Bruzzini’s comedically emphasized warbling. The nearly non-stop giggling of the children in the audience said that both men hit their targets.

The remaining six cast members all play multiple animals. Lori Skubich stands out as both the Snail (belting the 11:00 number, I’m Coming Out of My Shell) who literally carries snail mail and as the Young Frog in Frog’s scary Halloween story. Stuart Vance, Amy Royle, Geri Larson, Margo Raube and Carrie Pyykkonen all do stellar work in their many roles as birds, mice, squirrels and moles. There is some very fine ensemble work going on here.

Standout songs include the aforementioned Shell number, He’ll Never Know (a soft shoe routine for raking leaves), Shivers (an operatic Halloween story), Merry Almost Christmas (a carol with beautiful harmonies) and the wonderful Getta Loada Toad (a Dixieland ode to both making a mountain out of your own molehill and the wonders of childhood cruelty).

The set design is beautifully done and the set crew does a great job with the numerous scene changes.

The only real complaint would be the recorded music score, on two counts. First, it’s obviously hard for the singers to keep up with some of the tempos and there is no way for the conductor to adjust to the singers – because there is no conductor. Second, don’t charge me a higher admission fee for a musical than for a straight show and then skimp on the live musicians. That’s just rude. And cheap.

Lastly, given the state of the economy, Wheaton Drama might think about cutting back on the rather high ticket prices. There were enough empty seats for a great family-friendly show to say loudly and clearly that it costs too much to come in.

However, if you think the price is doable and you’d like to take your family to a great seasonal show that you haven’t already seen in seventeen different variations, you couldn’t do better than to see A Year with Frog and Toad at Wheaton Drama. It’s a wonderful family show and it’s done very well by Bruzzini, Schroeder and company.

A Year with Frog and Toad continues at Wheaton Drama, 111 N. Hale Street, Wheaton through December 14. Fridays at 8:00 p.m., Saturdays at 3:00 & 7:00 p.m., Sundays at 3:00 p.m. (No Thursday performances for this production.) For reservations and information, call (630) 260-1820 or order online at http://www.wheatondrama.org/.

Creating ARThur – 7/16/08

For box office information, click on the title of this review.

Not many theatres around here have the balls to premiere a new script. A show that hasn’t already gone through a dozen previews and a New York run, so that the more basic imperfections are already ironed out? Heavens. Wheaton Drama has enough self confidence to try it and apparently their audience is buying into it, at least judging by the size of the house I saw last weekend. Good for them.

Creating ARThur is a comedy by Bill Ball (and “associate writers” Wendy Ball and Jodie Klassen, as designated in the bios. If they wrote part of the show, their names should be in the byline. Fair’s fair.) The plot concerns middle-aged brothers Alex and Andy Burns, whose older brother Arthur has just died. Alex, a schemer whose success rate makes Ralph Kramden look like Donald Trump, talks Andy into a hare-brained plan to have one of Arthur’s paintings hung in a museum. This involves scamming art auctioneers and museum owners into recognizing the late, great “De La Byrnes”. A phony biography is cooked up, deceptions are perpetrated, the brothers’ wives become suspicious and all we need is a belligerent cop snapping, “Why, I oughta…!”

Anyhoo – hilarity ensues. For the most part.

Annie Walker-Bright’s direction is focused and farcical. And, combined with set designer Don Dumper’s work, she does something innovative and brilliant – the opening scene switches between the brothers talking in one room and their wives talking in another. Instead of going the normal route and placing them at opposite ends of the stage, with lights going up and down as the occasion demands, there is a huge, blank painter’s canvas at centerstage. It’s on a pivot and is used as a revolving door. Husbands are talking, scene’s over, they pivot the canvas to reveal the wives while the husbands disappear. It makes for instant scene changes. Really nice work. Walker-Bright is also adept at moving a large amount of people (for a non-musical) in the background without having them be either distracting or static.

Dennis Brown (as Alex) and Chris Williams (Andy) work their asses off to put the material over. Both men are very funny and, when the material is up to their level, as in a mini “Who’s on First” about which phony name Andy is to use that day, they nail it. They have nice chemistry together.

Susan Carr (Alex’s wife Lorraine) and Dawn Herbst (Andy’s wife Esther) have similar chemistry and talent. They are enormously likable and funny; the script needed to give them more than exposition and suspicion.

One problem with the script is that this is a situation comedy that wants to be a farce. I mention this now because there are only two truly farcical characters in the show, which points up the sitcomicality (Hooray! New word!) of the rest of the show. Angelicque Cate as a raucous, chatty, anyhooing waitress who turns up EVERYWHERE, steals Act One. Act Two is stolen by Steven Merkel as a screaming queen (Hooray! Non-PC comedy!) art salesman. My biggest suggestion for the script is to have them come through the last scene as a couple. Both performances were broad and bigger than life – thank god.

The rest of the ensemble was extremely good – valid characters when necessary and unobtrusive in the background for crowd scenes.

On the whole, a funny show, due at this point more to the cast and direction than to the script. Let’s talk about that for a minute. Since, as screenwriter William Goldman says, everybody thinks they can improve scripts, there’s no reason for me to be any different. So; to the playwright(s):

The script could lose twenty minutes without any perceptible damage. It is one-third action and two-thirds talking about what they’re going to do. The chatter goes on FOREVER. A scene between the wives goes on and on and on making the same point – their husbands are acting weird. Instead of being straight-women – long-suffering sitcom wives – it would have been far more interesting to see them with actual personalities & quirks of their own. They are standard-issue “What are those goofballs up to?” characters whose dialogue is there just to give them equal stage time rather than something interesting to do with it. Carr and Herbst were obviously capable of much more than they were given.

As for Andy and Alex – both characters are too frantic. For me, it would have been more of a contrast to have Alex be insanely, groundlessly confident. The best scheming teams (Zero Mostel & Gene Wilder in The Producers, Peter Falk & Alan Arkin in The In-Laws, Bing Crosby & Bob Hope in the Road movies) have a friendly, confident sheepdog leading a terrified sheep into a saloon full of wolves. Having both characters sputter doesn’t work.

Start ruthlessly attacking your own logic, or wait for reviewers to do so. Banks do NOT take as long to process checks as they did twenty years ago. Why are NONE of the art dealers wondering why there is no mention of the famous De La Byrnes anywhere on the internet? I could Google information like that in two minutes – why wouldn’t they? Why don’t the gallery salespeople fight like hell when a sale is threatened in that very, very, very long scene in Act Two? Until the art dealers and wives show up, there’s no comedic escalation.

Lastly, you need to think visually. For a show about painting, 70% of this is a radio show. Place scenes in locations where the characters have to DO something while they talk. The director did a fabulous job fleshing it out; give her some help.

But away from the playwright and back to the casual review reader: is it worth it to buy a ticket? Yes. The cast is fabulous, some of the performances are gems and there are enough laughs. If you’re tired of sitting through Godspell (not that I ever would) and Steel Magnolias, get out and support the idea of trying new shows. Hooray, Wheaton Drama! Anyhoo...