Walking With Special Effects!

Dave got us comps to "Walking With Dinosaurs!" a BBC edutainment product that consists of a lot of very expensive, very cool life-size dinosaur animatronic puppets walking around the stage while a human character does a very frothy gloss on their lives, habits, etc. It was probably great for the ten-year-olds in the audience (of which there were many), but childless adults should avoid this show. Yes, the puppets are cool. They look great, they move with a ponderous strength that may or may not be realistic -- but they don't do much except move with ponderous strength. They move forward. They move backward. They move their necks to and fro. They roar.

Snore.

The human (Beazley? Bosley?) spoke with authority about all sorts of things I know we don't know about dinosaurs, which was kind of annoying for a supposedly educational show. Oh, but that's right -- it wasn't education, it was edutainment. I guess it's okay, then.It struck me that theater is now doing exactly what Hollywood movies have too often been doing since at least the '70s -- focusing on special effects to the exclusion of all other elements, such as story, conflict, drama, character, emotion. Blame it on Julie Taymor or Les Mis, or better yet don't blame it on anything at all. It's an attempt to keep and maybe even grow an audience for a medium that is losing audience. Good on them. But here's a clue -- combine the super-expensive, super-cool puppets with a plot, character, emotion and you might achieve something higher than edutainment. Whatever the hell that is.