Singing, dancing Frog and Toad set record

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/01/2005 (7656 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A musical about a pair of singing and dancing amphibians was the best-attended production in the 23-year history of the Manitoba Theatre for Young People.

MTYP’s holiday offering, A Year with Frog and Toad, starring Al Simmons and Steve Ross, sold 8,385 tickets and played to 91 per cent capacity during its 29-show run. As well, another 5,161 tickets were sold to school performances of the stage adaptation of Arnold Loebel’s sweet-natured preschool picture books.

“Around December there is a universal response to stories of love and friendship,” says MTYP artistic director Leslee Silverman. “Frog and Toad tapped into that. It was also an opportunity for Winnipeg to celebrate Al Simmons, and I think they did.”

The Canadian premiere of Frog and Toad was MTYP’s first foray into the world of big-time musicals and the endeavour paid off. It easily surpassed the former attendance record-holder Peter Pan, featuring Fred Penner, which in 2000 sold 7,979 tickets or 88 per cent of capacity.

It was also MTYP’s highest budgeted show ever, so a profit is unlikely.

“No, with $12 tickets, we’ll never make money,” says Silverman. “There’s no way we can, with $4.25 tickets to school shows.”

MTYP opens 2005 by bringing to the stage another couple of beloved picture book creatures, George and Martha, two ungainly hippos who learn the true meaning of friendship.

“They break down the myth that friendship is always perfect,” says Linda A. Carson, who is credited with adapting the James Marshall stories for the stage and is the puppeteer behind Martha. “I want the kids and their parents to fall in love with these hippos and witness two really good friends get into a few kerfuffles.”

The gentle George and Martha stories are a marked contrast from the other Carson play seen at MTYP this season. She penned Dying to be Thin, a disturbing but enlightening look at a day in the life of a teenage girl struggling with an eating disorder. It’s based on Carson’s own battle with bulimia when she was 20.

The two works couldn’t be thematically further apart.

“They feel like two different planets,” she says, during an interview from her home in St. Catharines. “When I see Dying to be Thin, it’s my daughter on stage. It makes my heart ache at what I see her go through. George and Martha is pure fun.

“They are the two ends of life. They are both important stories about human nature and human dilemmas.”

MTYP will donate the proceeds from its 1 p.m. Saturday performance of George and Martha to the Canadian Red Cross for tsunami relief projects that aid children in South Asia.

George and Martha opens tomorrow at 7 p.m. and runs to Jan. 23 at the CanWest Global Performing Arts Centre. Tickets are $12 and are available by calling the MTYP box office at 942-8898.

Prairie Theatre Exchange also scored a holiday hit.

PTE’s annual stage adaptation of Robert Munsch stories — this year called Mmm Munsch! — played to almost full houses, averaging 98.4 per cent attendance during the 17-performance run that ended earlier this month. The show is headed out on a 70-school provincial tour that includes a stop in Yorkton, Sask.

One of the oddities of next week’s TremblayFest — the first bilingual celebration of a master playwright — is the non-participation of Cercle Moliere, only the oldest francophone theatre in Canada.

“I know, I know but they came to us too late,” says the Cercle’s artistic director Roland Mahe. “If they talked to me before, I would have included a Tremblay in my season for sure.”

By the time festival producer Nick Kowalchuk announced Michel Tremblay would be the first Canadian to be so honoured, Mahe already had his 2004-05 season in place. The festival is conspicuously missing Les Belles Soeurs — Tremblay’s great, breakthrough tragicomedy — which just so happens to be what Mahe would have loved to present again.

“We did it in 1968, the year after it premiered in Montreal,” he says. “It sold out then and again in the ’80s and would have again.”

MTC attempted to talk Mahe into participating by hosting a reading of Forever Yours, Marie-Lou, say at Prairie Theatre Exchange.

“A reading in French at PTE!,” he says. “I think we would have lost our shirt.”

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca