Frog (Sienna Stautz) emerges from hibernation and sings about his cherished friendship with Toad.
By Brian Roebke
Editor
A musical following the woodland adventures of two amphibious friends, a worrywart toad and a perky frog, with their assorted colorful hopping, crawling and flying companions, comes to Wrightstown this week.
A Year With Frog and Toad is the upcoming Wrightstown High School musical that brings the audience through a year of time.
The show is held Thursday, Jan. 9, at 7 p.m., and Saturday, Jan. 11, at 1 and 7 p.m.
Tickets can be purchased at wrightstowntheatre.ludus.com.
Tickets are $10 each for adults and $8 for students, 5 and under are free. Tickets are available online or at the door.
Wrightstown choir teacher Rachel McCully is directing the show for the first time in her teaching career but she has experience with this particular show from Medford Area Community Theatre.
When McCully started teaching last fall, she didn’t know what she had to work with so she held blind auditions for students, who sang songs they felt showcased their personalities and vocal ranges.
“From there, as I was trying to choose a show that accommodate everyone who had auditioned, I was starting to see characters from this show shining through in their personalities and in their skills,” she said.
The show is based on the Frog and Toad children’s book series written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel. They began getting published in 1970, and books are commonly used for first- and second-graders. “They’re in between picture books and chapter books,” McCully said. “They’re a very fun series for kids.”
Frog is level-headed and Toad is more worrisome and grumpier but they make it through many adventures together.
“The show is silhouettes from those stories, so the dialogue is more simple, the storyline is more simple, but then we add some very fun, interesting, and somewhat challenging music to go with it,” McCully said, noting about half of the students remembered read-ing the books when they were younger.
The show goes through what would be considered a year in their life. “We start in the spring with them waking up from hibernation, we go through summer, fall, winter, and then they go back to hibernation at the end of the show,” McCully said.
A Year With Frog and Toad opened on Broadway at the Cort Theatre on April 13, 2003, but after the jump from a $30 off-Broadway ticket to a $90 Broadway ticket, the show closed on June 15, 2003, after 73 performances and 15 previews.
The show broke new ground by bringing professional children’s theatre to Broadway, sparking the interest of the age 3-10 set.