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Prehistoric Creatures Star in 'World's Largest Puppet Show'
 Katherine Tulich - Los Angeles Times
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September 11, 2010
| | Walking With Dinosaurs, the massively popular, family arena specatacular returns, rendering the original BBC show into a live show with 15 life-size dinosaurs, including a T Rex walking out in the audience. (Joan Marcus) | |
'Walking With Dinosaurs' aims to bring entertainment and education to the masses in an arena setting.
Lead puppeteer Kara Klein is "dino-checking" her ankylosaurus. From a podium at the rear of the Honda Center in Anaheim, she is getting her 12-foot-tall, 34-foot-long dinosaur to move its head, tail and even gently nudge one of the technicians on the floor all by manipulating a small metal claw contraption dubbed the "voodoo rig."
"We take him through every axis of motion to make sure he is working correctly," she says. It takes two puppeteers and one driver for each of the 10 roaring and snarling creatures to make their way through the arena, while five smaller dinosaurs including a baby T. rex are operated by performers inside the suits.
"This is a dream gig for a puppeteer," says Klein. "You get to work with the coolest remote controls ever. But also, as a performer, puppeteers rarely get to be in the world's largest arenas."
For a long-extinct species, dinosaurs have a way of constantly coming back. The show, "Walking With Dinosaurs — the Arena Spectacular," is making one last swing along the West Coast, finishing up at Staples Center this week where the giant animatronic creatures on this tour will take their final steps.
It's been quite an evolution since the project had its genesis in a Melbourne, Australia workshop in 2006. Based on the award-winning 1999 BBC television series by the same name, the Australian show debuted in Sydney in January 2007, presenting life-size dinosaurs in a spectacular arena production while still sticking to a historically accurate script designed to be as educational as it is entertaining.
"I never thought it would come this far. I thought, when I was initially approached, it would go away like most ridiculous ideas," laughs creative director Sonny Tilders, on the phone from Melbourne. An expert on film animatronics, Tilders was given the task of "hatching" the dinosaurs.
"The initial concept was to use cherry pickers, but I knew that would never work. Instead, I borrowed a lot of technology that has been used to control animatronic creatures in feature films," he explains.
To give the appearance of flesh and blood weighing up to 20 tons, Tilders used a system of "muscle bags" made from stretch mesh fabric and filled with polystyrene balls stretched across moving points on the body. "They contract and stretch the way muscle, fat and skin does on real creatures," he says. It took a team of 50 people a year to build the original production.
The team created 10 different dinosaur species representing 200 million years of history, including a breathtaking 36-foot-tall and 56-foot-long brachiosaurus and the menacing adult T. rex that is the climax of the show. "People come not knowing what to expect and are just blown away," says Lynda Lavin, the show's resident director.
"It's a really theatrical show," she says. "We have an actor who plays a paleontologist who is your host for the evening and takes you on a journey of the history of the world and the history of dinosaurs. You could call it the world's largest puppet show."
"Walking with Dinosaurs" has now played to an audience of over 4.1 million people across the U.S., Canada and Mexico. "Most people have seen dinosaurs animated on TV or film, or bones in a museum, but to see them in front of you like this — they look like they could walk right out of the arena," says puppeteer Kara Klein.
In its three-year run, only minor changes have occurred. "The plates on our stegosaurus used to light up when he was attacked, but the BBC wants the show to be as historically accurate as possible and because it wasn't a correct interpretation, we stopped it," says Lavin.
While the art of film animatronics is becoming an extinct art form in itself due to advances in computer generated imagery, a live show is different, according to Tilders. "There is something still magical about seeing something moving in front of you," he says.
His Creature Production Company is now working on future shows including a theatrical presentation of "King Kong" and an arena show based on DreamWorks' hit animated film "How to Train Your Dragon."
"Dinosaurs are definitely a hard act to follow, but I think we have created a new genre that takes the best of animatronics from the film world and transfers it to the stage," Tilders says.
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