It’s the second day of rehearsals and two of veteran director Nigel Jamieson’s star performers are improvising their characters’ first meeting. Jamieson’s voice echoes off the walls of the cavernous Fox Studios soundstage: “Back up, he’s a bit more nervous.” One actor retreats, startled, while the other hesitates and extends a reassuring hand. “Make yourself small,” suggests Jamieson. The younger actor does so, crouching lower to the ground, allowing his scene partner to gradually relax and accept the interloper’s presence.
It’s a wonderfully emotive vision of first contact. For a moment I think of David Attenborough reaching out to a curious mammal, or the connection between ET and his young friend Elliot. In this case, one of the performers is a mop-headed 18-year-old from Melbourne, Rarmian Newton, and the other is a hulking, wart-studded dragon. “Can you show us pleasure?” asks Jamieson, and the beast, known as a Gronckle, quivers with animal delight.
“I want one,” murmurs the seemingly hardened journalist standing beside me.
The Gronckle is just one of the 24 animatronic beasties being constructed for the theatrical adaptation of How To Train Your Dragon, premiering in Australia in March 2012. “They are probably the most sophisticated puppets on the planet,” says Jamieson, with a hint of pride. “They’ve got very delicate controls. Every part of your mobility as an actor translates into the dragons.” Behind us, the other dragon on show, a spike-riddled monstrosity called the Nadder, issues a bellowing roar, and Jamieson smiles ruefully. “They’re a little bit badly behaved, and they can spit fire at you at the end of a long day, but overall they’re like good, regular actors.”
The arena show is an adaptation of Dreamworks Pictures’ 2010 film (itself based on a children’s book) - an unexpected combination of visual spectacle, contemporary humour and honest, emotional storytelling that found critical and commercial success. (On the film reviews aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, it holds a 98 percent 'Fresh' rating.) Among its many triumphs, the film was lauded for its brilliant 3D animation – something that too often serves to distract from rather than deepen the experience – but given 3D is old hat for theatregoers, the stage adaptation seeks to take the marriage of technology and narrative into unexplored terrain.
“I don’t know if there’s ever been a theatre show going out into arenas that’s as complicated and sophisticated. There are many, many sciences which we’re pushing to the edge and combining in a radical new way. Dreamworks has wanted this to be something unlike the world has ever seen before, and I suppose they’ve got the resources to take a punt on that.” Jamieson compares it to “when Jeffrey [Katzenberg, Dreamworks CEO] did The Lion King, and then there was Julie Taymor’s stage version. I think that was a new kind of theatre, it felt really different from the musicals we’d had before. I think we’re hoping to do that in arenas.”
The Nadder has been roaring on and off for some time now, showboating for the TV cameras. When it stops for a moment and lowers its head, I’m struck by a strange, pensive gentleness in its body language. Jamieson is momentarily taken with my reaction. “The animatronics aren’t about blowing something away,” he explains, “they’re about allowing these moments of intimacy: joy, and excitement, and all that are great in an arena, but if you can do an emotion, with 50,000 people, feeding in and out of one boy in that colossal space... that’s the key.”
It’s the story, not the spectacle, that initially drew Jamieson to this massive undertaking. “What we’ve committed to is not doing a circus. We’re telling a very powerful, emotional, moving story. It’s a story about a society that all of its life has fought these dragons, and one boy for the first time stops and looks into this dragon’s eyes and finds a similarity, and finds what they can do together. And his whole society grows from casting off that fear and making its enemy his friend. That’s the core of the story. If you face your fears, and you really look at those things in your life that you think are your enemies, then you might find they’re your greatest assets.
“It’s a good story for Australia, particularly with the papers yesterday running headlines about the fact we’re going to be ‘invaded’, and ‘overcome’ by asylum seekers. I think we are in a very fear-riddled society at the moment, and we’re made to feel frightened of a lot of things that we shouldn’t feel frightened about, that we should embrace.”
Time Out's seven-year-old reporter, Bill Blake, says:
The dragons in How To Train Your Dragon look very realistic. They are huge. They are just as good as the dinosaurs in Walking with Dinosaurs and they are made by the same people. I wasn’t scared when they blew smoke at me. But I was a bit scared when they roared really loudly.
One of the dragons, Gronckle, could fart! The other one, Nadda, has really big wings. It looked amazing. The girl playing Astrid is a martial arts expert. I thought her moves were all really cool. The boy playing Hiccup was a pretty good actor. The music sounded great too. I think kids are going to love this show.
Price from $39.90 to $99.90
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