Walking With Dinosaurs: The Live Experience
Dinosaurs. It seems every child goes through a phase when they are obsessed by dinosaurs and judging by the diverse crowd inside the Acer Arena some people never grow out it. Which is just as well as you have to be pretty into dinosaurs to really enjoy Walking With Dinosaurs: The Live Experience.
In case you hadn’t heard, Walking With Dinosaurs was a television series that swept the world, bringing dinosaurs to life and allowing people to “see” them in their natural habitats. They weren’t chasing cars and chomping through the electric fences of Jurassic Park, they were existing, foraging and basically getting on with whatever it is that dinosaurs do ... did. Following the success of the BBC series the idea was hatched to turn the show into an “Arena Spectacular.” Now, several years on, we have the end result: a show that brings dinosaurs to life before your very eyes.
The show, which lives up to the term “spectacular,” follows a paleontologist (Bruce Spence) as he takes us back in time to the Triassic (245 to 208 million years ago) Jurassic (208 to 144 million years ago) and Cretaceous (144 to 65 million years ago) periods. Along the way he introduces us to some of the dinosaurs and plant life of the different periods and explains how they lived and interacted with each other.
It should be noted that this show doesn’t contain a fictional story linking everything together, Spence’s character serves as an observer only and delivers what amounts to a dinosaur lecture throughout the evening. It would be interesting to see how the show would work if the audience were able to follow characters (especially if they were kids) as they time travelled - literally to walk with the dinosaurs. At the moment there is probably too much factual information, which while interesting, is mostly lost on an audience more interested in oohing and aahing over the creatures.
Which brings us to the real stars of the show. They are very cool and elicited astonished gasps from the crowd. The problem with most computer-generated dinosaurs in films and on TV is their interaction with their surrounds. That’s not the case here. These dinosaurs move as you would expect them to and really do look the part. Although we may have all seen pictures and videos of dinosaurs it is hard not to be awed when a 10m-tall behemoth appears before you.
Although impressive they are not without their limitations, however. There is very little physical interaction, even when they are meant to be attacking each other, which results in a few anti-climaxes. However, that’s a minor quibble with what is otherwise a truly monumental feat of animatronics and stage wizardry.
Although short (running for just over an hour plus intermission) the show is very slow in places, but then it’s difficult to make continental shift exciting. The lengthy sequence with the flying Ornithocheirus that opens act two is painfully boring and lost a few members of the audience (it just hangs from the roof and flaps its wings and if you’re not directly in front of it you lose the flying effect provided by a video screen). And sometimes the dinosaurs have to stop on stage to wait for their turn to exit, which is comical rather than dramatic. However with a few more performances and some tweaking, most glitches will probably be sorted.
A word of warning though, this show is very, very loud, a fact that clearly upset some of the younger members of the audience. Although James Brett’s score is fabulous, it is played at such a high volume that when combined with sound effects it creates a cacophony of noise. While the sound level is necessary to mask the whirring of the dinosaur mechanisms it could have been a little more comfortable on the ears.
If you love dinosaurs or have a child who loves dinosaurs then you won’t wantto miss this. Although it isn’t perfect, it is one of those events that you walk out of thinking “wow, I’ve just seen something special.” The lighting (by John Rayment) and the set design, particularly the plant life (by Peter England) are worth the price of admission alone. Of course it is the dinosaurs everyone wants to see and they won’t let you down - you really do get to walk with the dinosaurs.
