By J. Scott Hill

We at Chicago Stage Review are peas in a couple of pretty specific pods, bound one to another not only by our love of the performing arts, but by our acolyte-like devotion to all things Godzilla. The mere mention of a humungous fake dinosaur rampaging through a major metropolitan area can derail “theater shop talk” indefinitely. Once we learned that Walking with Dinosaurs – The Arena Spectacular would be coming to Allstate Arena, the occasional audible “Squee” bubbling out of one of us was enough to indicate that we had pretty high hopes.

Our wide-eyed anticipation, however, does not mean we are a bunch of pushovers.

This is Chicago – home of Kukla, Fran and Ollie, B. J. & Dirty Dragon, and Garfield Goose and Friends. From the innocent joy of Puppet Bike to the sinister machinations of Redmoon Theater, Chicago is a hardcore puppet town. While we at Chicago Stage Review love puppets and people in dinosaur costumes, we have a low tolerance for dino/puppet suckage.

Walking with Dinosaurs – The Arena Spectacular accomplishes many things, and suckage is not among them. Walking with Dinosaurs – The Arena Spectacular manages to combine elements of wildlife documentary, mockumentary, theme park show, guided natural-history museum tour, and a trip to the zoo, to create a grand spectacle chockablock full of both information and drama.

Jack Stone plays the narrator, an onstage fictional paleontologist named Huxley, with gregarious believability. As warm and familiar and authentic as Stone’s performance is, he could have be a three-headed slime monster from Rigel Seven: the production is not called Walking with Paleontologists.

The dinosaurs are the whole shebang, and they are so astoundingly wonderful that they absolutely overwhelm the audience. Creature designer/builder Sonny Tilders has gone so far beyond normal stage puppetry and effects, into the realms of blockbuster movie magic. These creatures completely look and feel alive. The seemingly cumbersome mechanisms for locomotion between the feet of the larger dinosaurs (looking like the dino accidentally stepped on a Formula One car) neither distract nor detract from these amazing feats of creature engineering. Old familiars like stegosaurus, brachiosaurus, and T. Rex are joined by some oddball dinosaurs like the heavily armored ankylosaurus and the giant-headed torosaurus. From the texture and drape of the skin, to the voluntary and involuntary movements of the eyes, to every ferocious step, the thunder lizards in Walking with Dinosaurs – The Arena Spectacular give no indication of being fabricated, mechanical, theatrical devices.

Walking with Dinosaurs – The Arena Spectacular contains no blood and very little violence and gore. I did see a few very small children get too scared to watch, but eventually even these kids warmed to the experience. My twelve-year-old daughter said, “Walking with Dinosaurs is amazing. The T. Rex is so lifelike that when it came close, I had to cover my head for protection.” So did her Dad, and everyone else in their section.

DO NOT MISS this brief opportunity to go Walking with Dinosaurs at the Allstate Arena with your whole family. This is a theatrical event that will take you a quarter of a million times farther back into the past than a trip just up the road to Medieval Times Dinner and Tournament, yet Walking with Dinosaurs – The Arena Spectacular generates a similar kind of immediacy, a similar thrill stems out of the high-spirited live entertainment, providing a similar massive adrenaline rush for the awestruck crowd. At Walking with Dinosaurs – The Arena Spectacular, there is an exuberant feeling of potential mayhem, as if the life-sized adult tyrannosaurus rex could at any moment break free of the Allstate Arena, head west a few miles along I-90, and terrorize Mitsuwa Marketplace or head downtown and trample the Loop!

4 STARS

(“Walking with Dinosaurs – The Arena Spectacular” runs through August 1 at the Allstate Arena, 6920 N. Mannheim Rd., Rosemont. 800-745-3000.)

Buy Tickets - www.dinosaurlive.com The official Walking with Dinosaurs, Arena Spectacular website. Touring the UK, USA and Europe NOW!

Walking with Dinosaurs – The Arena Spectacular production photos by Joan Marcus.

* Check out an EXCLUSIVE Photo Essay here: Walking with Dinosaurs – The Arena Spectacular @ Allstate Arena - EXCLUSIVE PHOTO ESSAY - Chicago Stage Review

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