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Newspaper Articles 
Theater review: 'Frog and Toad' is both polished and winsome 
St. Paul Pioneer Press
Published: August 24, 2002
By Dominic P. Papatola
Let's just come right out and say it: The Children's Theatre Company's production of "A Year With Frog and Toad" is going to be a big, big hit.
And it deserves to be. This lovingly guileless adaptation of Arnold Lobel's popular children's books is mightily entertaining and has just about everything going for it.
Robert Reale contributes a jaunty score that will send even a 5-year-old into the lobby humming its tunes. Most of the music is jazz-influenced, but there are a few musical surprises along the way. Frog, for instance, delivers a disarmingly fetching ballad about the joys of amphibian life. And a singing snail provides a delightful recurring high-energy western theme having to do with delivering mail.
A light-touch script by Robert's brother, Willie Reale, does a remarkable job of capturing the spirit and tone of the books without mimicking them. And Jay Goede and Mark Linn Baker bring the title characters to marvelous life.
Goede makes a suave and dapper frog, with a silk-smooth but sweater-comfy performance that is easy and appealing. Baker's softer, rounder features, combined with a face that can find all the emotional flavors between hangdog and dyspeptic, make his Toad an endearing nebbish.
Together, the two are yin and yang, Laurel and Hardy, spaghetti and meatballs. They can clash playfully one moment and hoof happily the next with the kind of bright, sure comradeship that characterizes all the great Mutt-and-Jeff pairings of this world.
The duo is well supported by a three-person chorus that represents a fistful of characters from the wild kingdom, from birds to moles to turtles to lizards. Danielle Ferland and Kate Reinders are extremely capable performers, but Frank Vlastnik nearly steals the show as "the snail with the mail."
"Frog and Toad" is not quite the technical eye-popper that many CTC shows are, but its deceptively simple set — designed by Lobel's daughter, Adrianne— is quaintly effective. Martin Pakledinaz's costumes are similarly understated, except for the lushly realized "migrating" outfits of a trio of birds.
Amid all this enthusiasm, it's important to note the shadow behind the success. At least in this incarnation, "A Year With Frog and Toad" is not the kind of play the Children's Theatre would produce on its own at this point in its history. The show has an intangible but indubitable commercial sheen in everything from the vanilla-flavored orchestrations to the oh-so-accessible script that is without a scintilla of subtext or a dollop of depth.
The show operates well within a zone of acceptability because the Children's Theatre's co-producers on this project — which include a New York producer and Lobel's daughter — eventually want it to be a commercial success for a mass audience who doesn't have access to the engaging, sometimes challenging work that the Children's Theatre is capable of producing.
So while the production resides at the Children's Theatre, its soul lives somewhere else — in a place where money is just a little bit more important than art.
Make no mistake: The charms of "A Year With Frog and Toad" are genuine and undeniable. But they also bear the faint chill of calculation.
More about A YEAR WITH FROG AND TOAD»
Copyright 2002 Star Tribune. Republished here with the permission of the Star Tribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the Star Tribune.
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