PROJECT TWO (2): ‘Toy Shop Tales’

Performed across schools and community centres across Islington, with Little Angel Theatre

January - February Twenty-Twenty-Six (2026)

Credits:

Production Manager: Conor Costelloe

Assistant Production Manager: Allissa Flood

Company Stage Manager: Krystal Anderson

Stage Manager: Christine Zak

School Liaison: Saran Polchan

Community Liaisons: Krystal Anderson | Christine Zak

Marketing: Corgil Chernova | Tara Choudhary | Keira Thompson Taitt

Poetry: Corgil Chernova | Hal Munger | EJ Walker

Sound Design, Composition and Operation: EJ Walker

Production Sound Engineers: Nalan Asya Asenova | Allissa Flood | EJ Walker

Acting: Hal Munger

Module Leads: Mima Beauchamp | Sophie Hope | Sarah Schofield | Jess Shead

Poster Design: Keira Thompson Taitt

One song and one piece of music I associate with this project:

‘New Horizons’ - Textures

‘Friendship’ - Toby Fox (‘Deltarune’: Chapter One [1])

EJ’s summary of the project:

‘A thirty (30)-minute puppet show, aimed at children aged five (5) - seven (7) years, which toured around primary schools and community centres in the Islington area in conjunction with Little Angel Theatre. The show followed a lonely ragdoll, named Willow, and the shiny new robot toy, named Robort, and aimed to educate children on the different kinds of toy in a toy shop, the history of toys, and values like friendship, acceptance and tolerance, and belonging.’

What did EJ contribute to this project?

Roles: Deviser for Acts Two and Three, Script and Poetry Writer, Sound Designer, Composer, Sound Operator, PSE, Puppet and Set Builder

Development

Devising and Writing

Poetry:

We decided as a cohort that our narrator figure, The Toymaker who worked at the back of the shop and was responsible for getting all the toys in working order, would narrate exclusively in verse. Hal, Corgil and I collectively decided that the pieces of would be in anapestic tetrameter (the same metre as poems like ‘The Night Before Christmas’), and in rhyming couplets. I was given control over the narration for Robort’s scenes, while Hal wrote the narration for Willow’s scenes, and Corgil wrote the narration for the final confrontation Act.

Scriptwriting:

The next few images depict sections of the script I helped edit once they had been devised. A lot of my work consisted of condensing and simplifying.

This example is from Act Two…:

…And this one is from Act Three:

Set and shadow-puppet building

Here’s a mini gallery of the set-pieces and props I either built, or helped build:

Robort’s poster:

The sides of Robort’s box:

Bingo’s two (2) big dominoes:

…And all but one (1) of the shadow puppets!

Sound, music and PSE work

Planning and time management:

Sound-wise, this project was going to challenge my time management skills a whole lot more than Project One (1) had, just because of the scope of my responsibilities, in composition, design and voice recording for three Acts, and supporting with PSE work. So, I kept schedules and timelines to help me remember what needed to be done, and to keep me on track:

Cue sheet and QLab document:

Here are the final cue sheet and what the final QLab section looked like for Act Three of the show. Allissa and Asya constructed the first QLab document from a draft cue sheet, and then I edited both the sheet and the QLab document over the course of our rehearsal runs.