Frogtown Mountain Puppeteers celebrate 26 years

BAR HARBOR, Maine (WABI) - Frogtown Mountain Puppeteers is celebrating its 26th year of bringing handmade hilarity to Maine audiences. The sibling creators perform shows year round in Maine, across the United States and in Canada.

Brian and Erik Torbeck, along with their sister Robin Erlandsen, make up Frogtown Mountain Puppeteers. The trio started putting on shows in 2000.

How it started

Erik said he took a puppetry class during his last year at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, which led to the creation of the group.

“We blame it on Erik for starting it,” says Erlandsen, laughing.

“I went to College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor and I took a class in puppetry my last year,” Erik said. “Andrew and Bonnie Periale of Perry Alley Theater in New Hampshire taught it.”

“[Erick’s} the oldest so then he pulled Brian in. And I’m the youngest, I got pulled in last,” Robin said.

“We did the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow and that was the start of it. Now we can’t stop,” adds Erik, chuckling.

WABI has featured Frogtown Mountain Puppeteers over the years. First on the WABI 5pm Show in 2003, just a few years after they got started. Then Joy Hollowell paid a visit to their Bar Harbor workshop in 2008. We were also at the Grand Theatre in 2020 for their holiday show “The Grinch.”

“It took us about five years to get to a point where we could quit our other jobs and do this full-time,” says Brian Torbeck. “We get a lot of double takes when people ask us what we do [for a living].”

Creating the puppets

Erik does most of the writing for the shows which include The Legend of the Banana Kid, Everybody Loves Pirates and the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.

“We’ll kind of talk about an idea, like cowboys or pirates,” explains Robin. “Then Erik will sit down and start hatching out an idea on the page. And then we’ll pass it around, and make changes, and then we’ll start doing read-throughs and figure out what voices we can use, and who’s going to be what character.”

Erik and Brian design and sew all of the puppets themslves.

“I actually am the one who can’t sew,” notes Robin.

“It’s important to get, you almost make them slightly cross-eyed, that way when the puppet looks at you, it just sort of becomes a little more realistic,” Erik explains.

Robin takes care of scheduling and the business aspect of the group.

All three voice and choreograph the shows.

The hand-and-rod puppets mean the siblings spend a lot of time with their arms raised in the air.

“This puppet, instead of arm rods, we made a glove. For this particular show, we’ll do a gag then, so I’ll slip this glove on and the audience doesn’t realize because we’re hiding,” explains Brian, holding up a puppet bear head in one hand and a puppet bear paw in the other.

The family connection comes into play when one brother voices a puppet while another controls it.

“That’s right, he has to follow my every word,” says one puppet to the other. “So that’s one thing over the years that we’ve sort of perfected. Maybe it helps being siblings that we can kind of anticipate when we’re going to say something.”

“Wow, that is, that is magical,” responds the second puppet to the first.

And, after more than a quarter of a century, the two brothers and sister say they still enjoy working and travelling to shows together.

“Any issues we have, we can just work out through the puppets,” says Robin smiling.

New show in the works

Frogtown Mountain Puppeteers is getting ready to put out a new show, an untitled musical featuring dinosaurs and cave people.

“We keep saying we’ve got to make our puppets a little lighter. But instead, Brian made all the dinosaur puppets probably five times heavier,” says Erik, laughing.

As for the name of the troupe, the siblings grew up on Frogtown Mountain in central Pennsylvania.

“It’s such a fun job,” says Robin. “We get to travel, we get to be with the audiences. It’s been a really great, great way to make a living.”

To view their show schedule, log onto www.frogtownpuppets.com/.