The Freckle Productions adaptation of Zog, the children's book by Julia Donaldson & Axel Scheffler is currently running at The Lowry in Salford over the summer. We were kindly invited by The Lowry to review Zog Live.
Over the last couple of years we have seen several adaptation of Julia Donaldson & Axel Scheffler work, one of our favourites being the Freckle productions adaptation of Zog & The Flying Doctors, so when we heard that Zog was coming to The Lowry we were all very excited to see the show.
This production has been directed by Emma Kilbey and it tells the story of the orange dragon Zog and his journey through dragon school. With the help of Madame Dragon Zog & his friends Ronnie and Edwin learn to fly, roar, breath fire, capture a princess and even fight a knight.
Zog does not find these tasks easy but he works heard and through determination and lots of practice he eventually achieves his goals of winning a golden star, along the way he makes a friend called Princess Pearl who is a young girl who wants to escape princess life and become a doctor.
This show has a cast of 5 talented actors/ puppeteer's who all do an amazing job of bringing these much loved characters to life on stage. Lois Glenister who plays princess Pearl gave a vey convincing performance of a little girl with her movements and facial expressions, she also has a beautiful voice which sounded wonderful in the musical numbers. One of my favourite characters from the show was Sir Gadabout the knight Ben Lock who plays him was hilarious in the role and his comic timing was just perfect, he had both the children and adults in fits of laughter.
Zog was played by Danny Hendrix who was excellent at portraying the accident prone dragon, he also had a great voice and was fantastic in all the musical numbers.
The Puppets in this show were designed by Lyndie Wright and she has done an amazing job of bringing Zog and his friends to life in puppet form. The Zog puppet looked exactly like Axel's drawing in the book. These gorgeous puppets could be worked by hand and could also be place on poles which allowed them to be flown out into the audience, which was something which all the children seemed to love.
The set for this show was very simple and consisted of what looked like a large green climbing frame in the centre of the stage with a couple of tree props and 3 stars hanging from the ceiling. Although simple I feel the set worked well for the show and allowed your focus to be on the actors and the puppets.
The Score by Joe Stilgoe is what makes this show one of my favourite kids theatre show, it has some great catchy tunes in it which I just can't get out of my head. My favourite songs from the show are "I can do it" and "I'll be a someone"
The show also has some audience participation as Madame Dragon gets the audience to try out some tongue twisters, she also asks the audience to help her keep the dragons in line by shouting out and telling her if the dragons were peeking when she told them to close their eyes. this resulted in the children shouting out and pointing at the naughty dragons, which helped keep the children engaged with the show. there was even a little spelling lesson in the show. In the finale the audience is encouraged to get up and sing and dance to the final number, all the children seemed to really enjoy this.
This show conveys some important messages to the young audience such as the importance of never giving up, patience, friendships and perusing your dreams.
Zog is an excellent family show and a great show for introducing young children to theatre. The show is just 60 minutes long which is about the right length in order to keep young children engaged, the suggested age range for this show is 3+ but I have to say I enjoyed this show just as much as the children if not more and I would happily go and see this show again.
With that being said I have to give this show 5 stars, we all had so much fun and we all left the theatre with a great big smile on our faces.
Zog is on at the Lowry in Salford until 3rd September 2023
Photo Credit - Mark Senior
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*Our tickets for this show were kindly gifted in exchange for an honest review
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