Review: Land of the Dinosaurs

I would like to start out by saying I’m conflicted. The desire to be nice and constructive is really fighting the desire to go all negative on this. It’s a battle where I don’t think I can find a middle ground, because the subject deserves both treatments almost equally.

Laureen and I were able to get away for three kid-free days to Glen Rose, Texas, which is known for several things:

• North Texas’ nuclear reactor is there
• There are dinosaur footprints that have been preserved in the state park.
• There’s a Young-Earth Creation museum to counteract the possible contamination of faith by facts.
• There’s an absolutely wonderful bed and breakfast
• There’s also a great little cafe/bookstore where we spent a lot of time.
• And other things, including some pretty golf courses, tourist traps, etc., that are part of life in a town outside of a large population center.

One of the things that Glen Rose has is a huge outdoor amphitheater which hosts a passion play called “The Promise” However, this runs only two months out of the year. So, it’s obvious that some people in the town realized that this very, very large amphitheater was essentially sitting unused for the bulk of the year. Thus was born the idea of Land of the Dinosaurs, which bills itself as the world’s best dinosaur musical.

While this statement is true, it must be stated that there is, at least for now, only one dinosaur musical (excluding possible touring rotations of Barney). Disney or other theme parks don’t have this market, and while some places have roller coasters or the like named after dinosaurs, like the Universal Studios Jurassic Park ride, those aren’t musicals. So the title of “best” applies, but it really needs to be footnoted with “only”.

When we drove up on a Saturday night, we were impressed by the large acreage of the parking lot–asphalt far and wide. The first indication that things were going to be weird was when we spotted the man asking for five dollars to park. Mind you, this is much like an arena or coliseum, but in those cases, you can charge for parking because it’s scarce. Cowboys Stadium has some pricing scheme that is essentially tied to how far you have to walk (and may God help you if you want to bring an RV… it’s $150 per game). In the case of Glen Rose, even though we were relatively early, there was no way that this parking lot was going to fill up. At the very least I hoped that the guy taking money had to walk around after the show started, checking to make sure that no one was stealing or defacing vehicles, or maybe stealing the precious, precious paint on the ground. I paid the $5 and drove to a parking spot near the entrance. There were no parking guides to direct me to my space. I felt like we could have replayed some action scenes from Mad Max–I mean complete car wars with salvaged parts– and not touched any of the existing vehicles. This was the first sign that things were going to be interesting.

We then went up to purchase tickets. There are three distinct ticket zones and prices, so we decided to splurge (it was our vacation, after all) on the premium reserved seating. We also opted to pay $5 for a backstage tour, because how many chances in your life do you have to get close to a dinosaur? We buy the tickets, look at them, realized there’s no assigned seat number, look at each other, ask the guy taking tickets “it’s a free for all?” “Yep. You shouldn’t have a problem finding a good place to sit.”

Uh oh.

We see that they have a ranger come and give a talk about the dinosaurs 15 minutes before show time. So we decide to pass by the souvenir store, where we could purchase a Dino-Lite to commemorate our Dino-nite. (Eat your heart out, Jimmie Walker), and we kept trucking past the kids coloring contest where the grand prize was a free backstage pass! So, you could have bought your backstage pass for your kid, entered them in the coloring contest (where the predominant colors of markers/crayons were green, brown, and purple?), have them win the unnecessary pass, and feel like you’ve wasted five bucks. Great planning.

Meanwhile, the background music that is playing over the loudspeakers is a loop of Mannheim Steamroller. Anyone remember them for anything besides their Christmas stuff? And do they get royalties from being used in this way for a paid performance? Those MPAA folks should investigate this.

We then walk over to a set of benches near the animatronic dinosaur located behind the gift shop. We wait for a while as the crowd gets… slightly bigger. A few people, mostly grandparents with their little kids, come and sit. We look around a bit further and realize that we’re the only adults without children present.

Uh oh.

A message booms out over the loudspeaker: “Don’t forget we’re having a free talk about dinosaurs at the concourse starting in just ten minutes!” The voice was okay, kinda like Mr. Moviefone with a head cold, but the announcements kept coming:

“Don’t forget to enter the drawing contest!”

“Visit our snack bar for some dino-bites!”

“Stop by our gift shop!”

“Help me, I’m trapped in a recording studio!”

Okay, that last one didn’t appear, but it could have.

Eventually, a man walks over with a clipboard and introduces himself as Ranger Rick (and no, I didn’t inquire about his magazine sales). At this point, Laureen and I realize that this isn’t a paleontologist here to discuss real dinosaurs, but some dude calling himself a Ranger who is here to tell us about the animatronic dinos used in the show.

Sigh.

The dinosaurs themselves are pretty impressive. They’re controlled via air pressure and pneumatics, so they have some range of movement, and their mouth movements can be synchronized to roars over the speaker. They cost between $50,000 and $150,000 each, and the production uses 8 of them. 6 appear on stage, 1 appears at the top to supplement the talk, and I guess one is kept in reserve in case one of the regular dinosaurs gets sick. Oh, wait. They’re just puppets. Silly me.

So we hear the lecture and then head down to our seats. There were no ushers to guide us to our seats, so we were essentially on the honor system with respect to our seating choices. But it felt wrong–they could have closed off both of the side sections and fit everyone comfortably in the middle. They could have closed off the entire upper deck area and fit everyone. I’d argue that they could have fir the entire audience into 4 rows down front. But we sat and waited.

The loop of Mannheim Steamroller continued. More announcements about how close we were to showtime.

A lady with an oxygen tank sits down a bit away from us. Her grandson sits next to hear, while her daughter sits on the other side. She gets out the bug spray and hoses her grandson down, sending the unmistakable scent of Bug-B-Gon in our direction. Laureen decided to vacate her seat for a while due to the fumes. I stayed and looked around. The general population followed the demographics of those at the smaller talk: older people and families with kids. As the announcer mentioned for the tenth time about how the show was just about to start, Laureen came back.

The stage itself is huge. There’s room for lots of people, and if you check out that Promise link you can get a sense of the dimensions. There’s a pool in front of the stage separating the audience from the stage proper, and I idly wondered if there’d be a swimming scene. All of a sudden, a man walked out onto stage wearing a t-shirt and shorts. He introduced himself as Ranger Jay. Apparently, he was there to warm up the crowd. Here’s Ranger Jay in a different guise:

Ranger Jay’s patter consisted of telling us how we were going to make this the best performance ever. He did this by stating that he would tell us this in just a little bit. This became his running joke, repeated every minute of his spiel. He’d start with an air of gravitas “And like I promised, I’m going to tell you how to make this the best performance ever,” comedic pause, “but first I have to tell you….” Jay introduced two of the other dinosaurs in the performance. At this time, the reality of the situation became clear. These dinosaurs couldn’t move on their own. They were on rolling frames to move partially onstage. You could see the frames by their feet, because no effort was made to hide them. So, the dinosaurs wouldn’t be doing anything but standing there and roaring.

Oh dear.

Jay talked about the amphitheater and The Promise, which some child in the audience called “The Jesus Play”. Jay asked where people were from. One family was from England. This deserved a round of applause. Jay’s repetition of the “best performance ever” line did not. However, this did not deter Jay in his effort to repeat it as much as possible. At this point, I was wondering what, exactly, was Jay’s purpose in being out there. We know there are dinosaurs; we didn’t pay $24 a person for an event called “Land of The Dinosaurs” to expect unicorns or lizard people. We knew there was going to be a musical, hopefully something besides Mannheim Steamroller. It seemed like he was there to deliberately stall until the sun had set below the rim of the bowl we were in. This sounds pretty logical, simply because you wouldn’t want your actors to be blinded when they sang or acted.

Finally, Jay revealed the secret of the best performance: we had to clap.

No, seriously. That was the entire secret. Clapping.

At this point I’d just about given up hope. While the company producing this spent a great deal on the dinosaurs, they didn’t spend nearly as much on the rest of the set. Having been in theater in both high school and college and also working as a show assistant in college, I understood the nature of trying to produce quality props on a budget. Of course, our high school’s theater was pretty awesome. We rented sets for the bigger musicals like “Camelot”. When we had to craft half of a car for “Grease”, it was done with loving attention to detail. Sometimes you have to just throw things together, like we did as show assistants, but you could get away with it because these were one-shot props, used one week and torn down the next. We didn’t have an entire season and repeat performances. Otherwise, we might have been more careful in detail. But that was then.

For a show with multiple performances over an entire summer, the set was awful. Just plain awful. The huge mountain in the background looked like it had been painted in one day. The side set pieces (some palm trees), looked out of place. I can understand not paying attention to detail if the detail is minuscule, but when you’ve got a LOT OF TIME TO JUST STARE AT THE SET BECAUSE YOU CAN’T TAKE THE INTRODUCTION GUY ANYMORE, you notice things.

Finally, after killing enough time, Jay departed the stage. Alright! It’s time for the musical!

I’ve previously mentioned how big the stage was. Here’s a picture that might give some indication. Just count the number of people in this shot:

Please understand that this shot is maybe one-third of the entire stage. There’s a lot of ground to cover.

So, you’ve got this huge stage, and you’re going to do a musical on it. How many performers do you think you need? If you guessed “six”, congratulations! Yes. That’s all they had. Six. Two “adults”, two “teens”, and two “kids”. Fortunately, they had kids in the “kids” role. Having adults would have really muddied the waters of believability.

The issue with having so few people for your entire musical is that you wind up sending them everywhere on the stage. Sing here, move there. Sing there, move somewhere else. It appeared like the director wasn’t willing to just stop and plant people for their songs or even their spoken parts. They had to constantly move. Sometimes this was necessary (although not necessarily needed) to cause them to interact with the dinosaurs, but a lot of the time it felt forced. Part of me wanted some sweet dance moves with the music. You know, like this. But we didn’t get any– just lots of chasing people around the stage.

So, it’s a dinosaur musical. It’s billed as a dinosaur musical. So, what is the story about?

Love. Time Travel. Relationships. Little kids stealing stuff. Altering the fabric of space-time. Deserting your family. Irish people. Widowers. Coming of age. Whining.

See dinosaurs in that list? Yeah. Me neither.

The first song is sung by the leading male, a father/geologist who has taken his kids to Glen Rose on vacation. But he can’t shake either his job or the memory of his departed wife. “What am I doing here?” is sung almost as a round by all of the characters in the first scene: the father, the older teenage son (who comes equipped with a stick-like guitar prop slung around his neck, apparently to indicate his hipness), and the boy and girl kids each take a turn whining about this vacation and how seriously uncool it is. I will give the composer credit; he isn’t afraid to end his songs on fourths instead of resolving them to the primary chord, but when it’s combined with immature singing voices, man. It’s nails on chalkboard.

So, after the song ends, the father and elder son have the “what are you doing with your life” conversation, which would be believable but… if the kid is going into the same field as his father, and his father’s found the dinosaur footprints interesting, then shouldn’t the teenager show at least a modicum of excitement about the footprints? Or the surrounding geology (cardboard though it may be)? Nope. Instead we get the “why did I follow you down this path?” tension. And then the little kids complain about not having a pet and not having their playstation. Dated already. We’re up to the Nintendo DS in portable gaming, people. Keep up.

They then stumble across… an Irish woman with a metal box around her neck. In Glen Rose, Texas.

She’s actually a scientist and inventor, trying to track down her sister and their father, who apparently teleported themselves out of 1965 into prehistory.

It is at this point when I must say that I, like a lot of other humans, find the concept of dinosaurs fascinating. It’s really neat to see skeletons of creatures that once existed and imagine what their lives were like. We’ve carried that fascination through our culture.

Um. Okay. So, maybe I’m wrong about that. Our idea of combining humans and dinosaurs wasn’t such a good idea after all.

ALL RIGHT! This is more like it! Dinosaurs doing what I really think they’d be doing: HUNTING US DOWN FOR FOOD.

Crap. Back to square one, except with Will Freakin’ Ferrell.

However, you can scan through the Discovery channel(s) and find dinosaur programming almost constantly. It’s a staple of us to want to imagine that time. So, let’s just create a reason to go there! Time travel! The Irish-accented lady with the machine somehow isn’t able to figure out which way to point it, and she sends the entire family plus herself back in time.

It’s at this point, when the actors are offstage, that the dinosaurs make their presence known. Lights dim. The spotlights highlight each dinosaur peeking out from the edge of the stage, including the massive T-Rex. Well, his massive head, anyway. They can’t move him out much farther than his neck. Amplified roars. Lights flashing. Oh, the mountain’s a volcano now. And then the abomination occurs.

See it? Let me highlight it for you.

IT’S A MAN IN A DINOSAUR SUIT! THE MYSTERY OF THE EIGHTH DINOSAUR HAS BEEN SOLVED! HE’S READY TO EAT THE CAST!

Okay, maybe I just made that last bit up. But the realization that this was the only dinosaur with any real ambulatory capacity just took the entire thing to an even deeper low point. More songs were sung. The sister of the explorer was found, and according to time travel logic, she was actually younger than her younger sister; she was a perfect matching age for the troubled teen son. She, too, spoke with a lilt.

Needless to say, the crew is stuck in time, primarily because there’s not enough juice to power the batteries on the time travel device. You can create a portable time traveling machine, but you don’t think of storing enough power for more than one trip? Headdesk.

The cast runs around the stage, gets separated from each other, and then gets reunited. They run to each of the dinosaurs, giving the dinos a chance to reappear onstage. However, a cunning plan is hatched: they’ll restore the battery by setting it next to the volcano, because it’s about to explode! THIS IS A GREAT IDEA! And everyone bursts into song.

The reviews describe the musical styles as “eclectic”. I’d argue a more appropriate term is “gawdawful”. There’s no consistency, no thematic elements (except for a reprise of “What are we doing here?”), nothing to tie one song to another.

Intermission. Coloring contest winner announced. Yay! Laureen goes to get a pretzel. More Mannheim Steamroller. A repeat of the talk about the animatronics. I was afraid Ranger Jay was going to come out again. But no, we were saved from that.

Act II begins. The time travel device is fully charged up, so they all prepare to return, including the found sister. Strangely enough, nothing is mentioned of the father. At this point, the little boy steals a dinosaur egg from a nest and hides it in his backpack. Through the magic of a well placed fog machine, they travel back to the present.

Of course, since that egg was stolen, the entire current ecosystem’s been destroyed. The weather’s changed. Dogs and cats are living together. A black man’s in the White House. It’s CHAOS, I TELL YOU! Plus, the older/younger daughter can’t come to grips with the present. Simple things like remote controls befuddle her, even though she was A SCIENTIST WHO INVENTED A FREAKING TIME MACHINE THAT WAS A REMOTE CONTROL. Then the baby dinosaur hatches. The boy’s subterfuge is uncovered. They quickly come to a decision: let’s all go back in time and fix this.

Several issues come to mind: why all of them? why not just zap the kid, since it was his doing that put them in this mess? Why not just zap the dinosaur itself? Because you don’t know where he’s going to wind up? Erm. By that rationale, you don’t know where you’re going to wind up, either. So…

They all go back. But there’s a PLOT TWIST that requires more singing: the dinosaurs are dying for some strange reason. Apparently the volcanic explosion that powered their trip back started to wipe them all out. Then, they wander into the head-path of the T-Rex. They all scream. However, they get saved by man-dino, who comes out across the stage and roars at the T-Rex head.

So, a new plan is hatched: the two teenagers decide to stay behind and warp the dinosaurs back in time to before the volcano strikes. Love songs are sung. The guitar is finally “used” as a prop. So, everyone else goes forward, but the two teens stay behind, because they realize that the little dinosaur the kid hatched is the same as man-dino. They’ve got to get him and the rest back to their proper place.

So it ends that way, with the teens happily stuck back in time, attempting to round up herds of dinosaurs and screw up the timeline by zapping them back even further into ancient history. However, everything is okay in the present, and the cast reunites for a “join us and clap, will you?” rendition of “Fire Down Below”. It ends. We go onstage, see the dinosaurs, then go back to the B&B. The missing father’s location is never considered. It’s left hanging out to dry, much like us in the audience.

The actors try. They really do. However, they can only be as good as their source material. And this source just isn’t that good. By the end of it, I was wanting the dinosaurs to eat the cast, crush the set, and trample the slower people in the audience. However, it’s their first season, so maybe things will get better.

Maybe.