Chicago Sun Times January 20, 2006
Hop to It: Chicago children's theatre debuts with musical 'Frog and Toad'
January 20, 2006
by Hedy Weiss
In search of the fastest, easiest way to defrost in the midst of a long Chicago winter? You have two choices.
Either delve into the pages of Arnold Lobel's beloved children's books, including the 1970 classic, Frog and Toad Are Friends. Or head out to "A Year With Frog And Toad," the hit musical by brothers Willie and Robert Reale that was inspired by Lobel's books. The show, which debuted in 2002 at the Minneapolis Children's Theatre, and was later produced on Broadway (where it received several Tony nominations), is the inaugural production of the newly established Chicago Children's Theatre. It opens tonight in the Goodman Theatre's Owen space, with Henry Godinez directing Joseph Anthony Foronda and Bradley Mott in the title roles, with Ora Jones, La Shawn Banks and Julie Ruth playing the rest of the whimsical animal kingdom.
But back to the defrosting process. Here, as Lobel captured it, is the birth of spring as it arrives for the ever-optimistic and energetic Frog, and the far more neurotic and skeptical Toad -- a couple of fully anthropomorphized amphibians who just happen to be the most devoted of friends and neighbors, despite their dramatically different personalities:
Frog ran up the path to Toad's house. He knocked on the front door. There was no answer.
"Toad, Toad," shouted Frog. "Wake up. It is spring!"
"Blah," said a voice from inside the house.
"Toad, Toad," cried Frog. "The sun is shining. The snow is melting. Wake up!"
"I am not here," said the voice.
Lobel wrote short sentences and kept the vocabulary simple, but the characters and situations he devised are understandable on many levels. Frog and Toad could easily be seen as a pair of archetypal "bachelor uncles" of an earlier period -- quirky brothers who might have settled into neighboring houses in the rural part of some state on the U.S.-Canadian border. The show's time frame is as poetic and irresistible as the language: It follows the unspooling of the four seasons, with gardening and swimming and sledding and a bit of hibernation all part of the cycle.
The New Jersey-bred Reale brothers -- Robert, 49, is the composer, while Willie, 48, is the writer-lyricist -- homed in closely to the spirit of the books to create a genuine little charmer that does what all good "family theater" must do -- appeal to both adults and children, each on their particular level. "We don't write for the kids," said Robert Reale. "We write for theatergoers, and then we check to make sure that the kids can keep up with it. I have a 13-year-old son and Willie has two sons, six and three. And we've both read the Lobel books to our kids along the way."
"We weren't really raised on Broadway musicals," confessed Robert. "There were six kids in our family, and taking all of us to the theater would have been too expensive. But our parents would go, and they'd bring us back the albums -- for 'Man of La Mancha,' or "Godspell," or even 'Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.' We weren't the kind of guys who knew every scrap and bar of Sondheim, however. We were rock and rollers mostly; we listened to the Stones and The Who."
Willie sidestepped college and began acting professionally at 18, along the way founding (and for 18 years serving as artistic director of) the 52nd Street Project, a New York-based theater program for kids that produced original musicals. Robert was a jazz major at Arizona State and began his career playing in Phoenix clubs. He now works as a record producer and makes his primary living writing the themes and incidental music for television news shows and pilots.
The brothers first took a crack at songwriting when, years ago, Willie vacationed out West and they spent three days in Sedona, Ariz., drinking beer and penning three "not very good songs." But "one thing led to another," as Willie put it.
In 2001, the two collaborated on "Once Around This City," a socially aware musical comedy about the haves and have-nots, produced by New York's Second Stage. The show was directed by Mark Linn-Baker and designed by his award-winning set designer wife, Adrienne Lobel, who just happens to be the daughter of Arnold Lobel.
"Adrienne asked us to take a crack at her father's stories for our next musical, so we wrote a couple of songs," recalled Robert. "When she heard them she said she was thinking more about the 1930s and '40s and the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers style. We said: 'Okay, we can do that,' and we started again. There is a real beating heart in Arnold's stories, and we tried to find the beauty in their simplicity."
"A Year With Frog and Toad" has become a favorite "family show" at theaters throughout the country (it already received a charming production in 2004 at the Illinois Theatre Center in Park Forest), and there are about 40 productions licensed nationwide for the coming year alone.
Meanwhile, the Reales, who are Yankee fans, are now collaborating with writer Richard Dresser on what Robert describes as "a gigantic epic musical about the Red Sox that has a panoramic view of 20th century American history." A reading-workshop is scheduled for April, and not surprisingly the show will probably begin it's life in Boston.
© 2006 Chicago Sun Times