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WALKING WITH DINOSAURS FIFTY-FOOT DINOSAURS STOMP INTO THE VERIZON CENTER

September 13, 2007 12:35 am

By MICHAEL ZITZ

After the jaw-dropping initial reaction wears off, audiences are getting emotionally involved with "Walking With Dinosaurs--The Live Experience," based on the award-winning BBC TV series.

The theatrical robot dinosaur show makes a tour stop at Washington's Verizon Center from Wednesday, Sept. 19, through Saturday, Sept. 22.

Cameron Wenn, resident director of the tour, told The Free Lance-Star this week in a telephone interview from a stop in Greenville, S.C., that the show--which packed arenas in Australia with an average attendance of 30,000--is also drawing large crowds in America.

The show's climax features a Tyrannosaurus rex mother defending her baby from predators.

Wenn said audiences react viscerally to the story, finding it easy to identify with the dinosaurs.

"One of the surprises is that the show does have quite an emotional journey in it," he said. "By the end, people have a relationship with these creatures."

Variety has called the dinosaurs "stunning, life-size and faultlessly nimble."

The two-hour show looks at the whole history of the prehistoric animals, Wenn said: "How they evolved and died."

By the end of the production, people are quite emotional about the relationship with the mother T-rex and the baby T-rex, he said.

"You do realize that even though this huge monster could easily have eaten one of us if we were around then, that she was protecting her baby. Once you peel it all back, it's not much different than a human mother with her human baby. We are all motivated by the same primal instincts, and that builds a connection."

Australian crowds were awestruck, but American crowds have been more vocal in their reactions, Wenn said.

"It's a given that children will want to come, but we have busloads of seniors, college students and people who are into tech," tour founder Bruce McTaggert said of the crowds during an interview with The Free Lance-Star at a July media preview in Washington.

McTaggert said it cost $20 million to develop the startlingly lifelike robotic dinosaurs that look like those seen in the film "Jurassic Park."

"This is a show that could only fit in arenas--as the creatures are so absolutely immense in size," said McTaggert, head of Immersion Edutainment, which is producing the tour.

Tickets are not sold for the lowest rows of seats in arenas, because it's difficult to take in 50-foot-tall dinosaurs with 6-inch teeth from a floor-level perspective.

The show includes the Tyrannosaurus rex as well as the plesiosaurus, liliensternus, stegosaurus, allosaurus, torosaurus and utahraptor. The largest, the brachiosaurus, is 45 feet tall and 75 feet long from nose to tail.

The dinosaurs are so large they must be partially disassembled at the end of each show for shipping, then reassembled when they arrive at the next venue. There is some inflation involved because they had to be made light enough and flexible enough to support their own weight. Wenn said the brachiosaurus' long neck would break if not for inflation.

He said film animatronics like those in "Jurassic Park" were a starting point for the creations on the tour, then existing hydraulic and fabrication technology was added to that. But new technology had to be developed to complete the startlingly lifelike packages.

"It was the first time anybody had done this sort of thing," Wenn said, "so everything had to be custom-built for our mission."