Oi Frog & Friends! - fun on stage and how to get your tickets
Based on the bestselling books by Kes Gray and Jim Field, it tells of a new day at Sittingbottom school. Frog is looking for a place to sit, but Cat has other ideas and Dog is doing as he’s told. Little do any of them know that chaos is coming...
Expect songs, puppets, laughs and more rhymes than you can shake a chime at, the producers promise.
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Hide AdOi Frog & Friends! is created for the stage by Emma Earle, Zoe Squire, Luke Bateman and Richy Hughes.
Playing Frog is Emily Essery who is delighted to be back on the road after all the lockdowns.
“It’s just great fun and it is a lot of things. It is based on the picture books Oi Frog and Oi Cat and Oi Dog and Oi Duckbilled Platypus which are rhyming books. They have created the show from the pictures. They’ve put the images on stage recreating them like for like and it’s a puppetry version. It is a children’s puppetry family show and they are books that are all the rage. My niece loves the books and can recite them all off by heart.
“I think there is a message in the piece about friendship and about understanding and also just teaching silliness and fun and that is it OK to maybe change the rules a little bit though maybe not all the time! It is 55 minutes with no interval and it’s got lots of bright coloured sets and costumes and puppets.
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Hide Ad“This new cast joined the show in November. It has toured before and it had a run in the West End and now post pandemic they have brought it back for a UK theatre tour and we will be touring until the end of September, beginning of October.
“And I think after the pandemic it is really nice to have things opening up and just to be getting back to it and having a little bit more certainty and just to be doing a job that we really love. And it’s nice to show that we’ve managed to get through all this.
“Everyone in our industry just banded together and found new ways to be resourceful. I did a show on Zoom.
“ It was a Sherlock Holmes online murder mystery and the audience joined us online and there were various rooms that they could go in on a website. It was like an Escape Room or the Crystal Maze, that type of thing.
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Hide Ad“I think I always knew that we would get back to the stage properly. It was just a question of playing the waiting game and seeing what happened. Last Christmas I was in another show back on stage The Gruffalo’s Child and we were shut down four days into our run. We despaired at the stop start nature of the way things were but you just had to accept it and just hope that one day the stop stop would stop stopping and we would just be able to keep carrying on.
“We just knew that it would happen one day so it is really nice now to be working.
“But at least during the pandemic I was secure and I have my house and there is no struggle in that sense. It was just a question of hunkering down.
“But actually I was stuck in Australia for the first couple of months of the pandemic. I was there with my brother and I managed to get back in May.
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Hide Ad“It was great in some ways because we would never get to spend that time together otherwise. My flights just kept getting cancelled and it meant family time and in the end, I managed to get back home.”
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