PREVIEW
Through Aug. 15.
The first time he heard about the dinosaurs, Scott Faris said no.
The New York-based theatre director received a call one day to see if he had any interest in directing a spectacle of a different sort: a live, theatrical version of a popular BBC documentary series about dinosaurs, featuring over a dozen robotic versions of them.
Before he laid eyes on a single dinosaur, Faris was skeptical.
"I was really dubious," says Faris over the phone from New York, where he lives. "I’m imagining this as I’m talking to this person and thinking, ‘No way. Nobody can build realistic dinosaurs that can move around an arena and the audience won’t go ahhhhh’ — come on. I’m thinking, ‘Cables, wires, not very sophisticated.’ "
However, all of that changed when Faris accepted the producers’ offer to travel to Australia to meet the people designing the dinosaurs.
"I walked in (to the dinosaur workshop) and saw my first dinosaur, and was completely stunned at how lifelike, how realistic it was," he says. "In its movement and the way it was detailed, covered and scanned, it was completely believable.
"The dinosaur was so realistic," he adds, "you watched the creature, and the creature took on a life."
That set the stage for Faris to tackle the job of directing Walking With Dinosaurs, which opened at the Saddledome for eight performances.
The show is a kind of live documentary featuring 17 life-size dinosaurs, with the large ones weighing in at 1,451 kilograms apiece.
Some of the dinosaurs featured in the show include Plateosaurus, Stegosaurus, Brachiosaurus and, of course, the Tyrannosaurus rex, the biggest and baddest of the lot.
The producers took the basic inspiration of the BBC television series — which is our continued fascination with prehistoric dinosaurs — and constructed a narrative that will be recognizable to anyone who has ever spent an afternoon at the movies.
Think heroes and evil villains.
"By default that happens, yeah," Faris says. "People align themselves with various dinosaurs. They feel more attached or aligned with certain dinosaurs — and everybody, of course, loves a villain. And who’s a bigger villain in the dinosaur world than the T. rex?"
None of which diminishes the lifelike quality of the dinosaurs in the show, he adds, or the historical and educational component of the production.
"The show is accurate in the way it presents dinosaurs," he says. "Their movement and behaviour, the facts we give — because that’s what the BBC series delivered, and we have to live up to that — but there are many mini-dramas within each scene, where you see one trying to eat the other, or hide from the other or whatever. And just survive, as the narrator describes."
"This was a harsh world that they lived in," he adds. "There’s a historic and educational component that goes into the entertainment which makes a lot of people happy, too."
While the sheer size of the dinosaurs in the show is awe-inspiring enough — the T. rex is seven metres high and almost 13 metres long — what made Faris so appealing to the show’s producers was that he’s one of only a few theatre directors who has worked on production on the sort of scale that Walking With Dinosaurs is.
Among the show’s he’s been involved with, either as a director or production designer, are Bette Midler’s The Showgirl Must Go On, Chicago, The Musical (which he’s directed in more than a dozen languages in 16 countries around the world), EFX! at the MGM Grand and Siegfried & Roy at the Mirage Hotel.
A big theatre for most Broadway shows is 1,800 seats, (or 25,00 at the Jubilee). The Saddledome, meanwhile, holds around 19,000.
Faris says Walking With Dinosaurs finds a way to turn a huge hockey arena into a storytelling space.
"You have to fill the space," he says. "You have to use it. And the scenic design is brilliant in that it creates, from when the audience walks in the door, a really interesting world that they look at: a big proscenium and a giant screen surrounded by a giant set of T. rex teeth– that’s the platform of the stage, and dinosaurs enter and exit through that. We’re like an ice hockey rink," he adds. "That’s how big our stage is."
But there’s one other crucial aspect to a show featuring dinosaurs that needs to seem as real as possible to sell the illusion: sound.
"It is very important," Faris says.
"Half an hour before the show, there’s a background soundscape playing, and you hear various things from thunder to distant roars to crunches through forests to trees and vegetation being crushed. It starts to bring them into our world from the moment they enter the arena."
The topper is the various dinosaur roars. And how do you create a dinosaur roar in 2010?
"That was great fun," Faris says. "There’s theories about the sounds they made, based on the shape of their skulls . . . or whether the fossils were hollow or solid or there were chambers in their skull . . . and so the documentary created sounds based on research and experts. We used that as our starting point."
As far as age appropriateness, Faris says it all boils down to just how much dinosaur your kid can handle — and also, not coincidentally, your child’s proximity to those dinosaurs inside the Saddledome.
"We had friends in London with a two-yearold daughter who came to the show and she was enthralled," he says. "She couldn’t get enough, and just sat there with her mouth open the whole time. And I’ve seen seven-yearold boys cry. So it’s not that we do anything horrifying. It’s a big arena, and the music can swell, the T. rex’s roar is loud — but there’s no blood or guts, because they are after all, robotic dinosaurs.
"It just depends on the kid," he adds. "And the parent knows best."
And finally, Faris is asked who is more difficult to direct: Bette Midler or a T. rex? "Well, T. rex doesn’t argue with you when you give it a direction," he says. "Neither does Bette, if you’re reasonable.
"And the dinosaurs," he adds, "don’t have the (show business) experience that she does."
shunt@theherald.canwest.com
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