Sunday, August 26, 2007

Frog-bites!

Greetings from the bandstand of Frogway...

It's the fourth day (and five shows) of the musical, Frogway, and it's been quite fun so far. Just a little bandstand info: The music of Frogway is generally played LIVE by a live band led by one of Malaysia's leading pianist/jazz musician, Michael Veerapen. The musicians involved are Michael Veerapen on piano/keyboards, Ee Jeng on 2nd keyboards, Fly on double bass and electric bass, Zahid Ahmad on V-drums, Eddie Wen on trumpet, and myself on saxophones and flute. Michael is also the composer of all the tunes in the musical, and quite a number of the songs were written by him in the 80s, with some contemporary twists this time around, of course. Saidah Rastam is the musical director for the musical.

The cast of Frogway are Vince Chong as Eddy the Frog, Harith Iskander (also director) as Smiley the Snake, Elaine Daly as Susannah the Stork, Ina Fabergas as Helen the Fish and Michelle the Frogette, Marielle Fabergas as Renee the Frogette, Chelsia Ng as Shirley the Frogette, Thor Kar Hoong as Horatio Frog (and some other characters and voice-overs) and Ash Nair as Freddy the Toad. Quite a zany cast, I might add, and all very good performers.

The band only had one-and-a-half weeks of intense rehearsals, so we managed to get fairly familiar with the tunes by the time we got together at the Actor's Studio to do the tech runs, and stage rehearsals. And we are pretty much having quite a lot of fun playing, and watching the cast act and sing, and also mess around with different sound effects for different scenes. We not only had to play our instruments like musical instruments, we also ended up with making different sound effects with it - Eddie does elephant, horse, frog sounds among other stuff, with his trumpet, while I make monkey sounds with the soprano, and bird sounds with my flute. Ee Jeng plays various sound effects with his Roland Fantom X synth that makes the acting bits of the show a whole lot more interesting. Even Michael plays a variety of sounds with his FP-1 digital piano!

Anyway, here are some cool pics taken with my phone with the band as well as some other actors in the show. Enjoy.


Harith as Smiley the Snake (check out da makeup!)


Da band l-r: Zahid, Ee Jeng, Eddie, fat-sax, Mike, and Fly


Horny horns with Eddy da Frog (Vince)


Eddy (Vince), Horatio (Thor), and Freddy (Ash)

By the way, I believe there are still tickets and another 8 shows to go.. so call 03-20940400 now to get your tickets and get your giggles at Frogway!

Later... Hisssssssss....ribbit!!

PS: We got rid of those green shirts in favor of a penguin suit instead.. tee hee...

1 comment:

Violinuts said...

I saw Mosburger just now. Hahahaha!