JJ Margolis

A Year with Frog and Toad is an adorable children's musical based on the children's books by Arnold Lobel. Our production focused on building the world that these characters lived in to create the setting for their tale of friendship. Every character is a small animal, so their homes and furniture are all built from things they would find. Cans of corn make their homes and small mushrooms and bottlecaps are their furniture. This aesthetic extended to my design, where the audience's aural perspective is shrunk to the size of the characters. Additionally, the play was conducted in a vaudevillian style, with little respect for the fourth wall. There was an on-stage character which represented a stagehand, channeling a mixture of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. He supported technical elements and costumes, following tailed characters with a puppet appendage, roaming the stage with props representing seasons, and occasionally cueing the show or fixing things, such as the turntable.

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My only musical design credit, my primary goal was to ensure the delivery of music to the audience and to build and support the setting through diegetic effects. These effects ranged from simple environmental ambiences to cartoonish and over the top effects.