Orchard Theatre, Dartford – 30 January 2022
Review by Donna Easton
3*** From me
5***** From my daughter!
I’ll start with a review from my 6-year-old daughter:
“I loved it mummy. It was soooo good. My favourite part was when Frog did the splits in the air and landed on the log on his privates!”
I always wonder how valid my grown-up perspective is on kid’s theatre as surely the review from my little girl is the most important, right? As you can see from her comment above she loved it.
I’ll say it was a lovely morning at the theatre but for me, this particular show had something ever so slightly off the mark. The story is glorious of course and the adaptation for stage works so well with the book coming to life in front of your very eyes. Now, I am not sure whether it was a tech issue or a venue issue but I found much of the dialogue hard to hear with some bits frankly inaudible. I wondered if it was just me so asked my daughter and her dad if they could understand what the animals were saying. He couldn’t either and my daughter said, “Not really but it doesn’t matter”.
Now, I know that an audience full of children will have its moments of distraction (it’s a big feat keeping under 6’s focussed for an hour) but here, I found that at times the audience had been lost (perhaps they had the same sound issue as us?).
Dog was definitely my favourite whilst my little girl LOVED Frog. The costumes are fantastic, the puppets are just wonderful, the songs were fun but I’m afraid Oi Frog! didn’t quite do it for me.
I do think that if the audibility of the dialogue and songs were fixed, I would have had a VERY different experience as all the other ingredients are there for a wonderful production.
All that said, my daughter loved it and seriously won’t stop talking about Frog landing on his privates, getting a splinter in his bum and getting farted on by Dog! Could we call that a successful trip to the theatre, I think so