download a PDF version - Kidscreen

Batman Live! has already
entertained 500,000
show-goers in the UK
and South America. US
audiences get their turn in
September.
34 May/June 2012
A new Ice Age
Twentieth Century Fox is also banking on transmuting the
success of a movie franchise into a lucrative touring live
show. With Ice Age Live! A Mammoth Adventure, the company
has partnered up with Netherlands-based Stage Entertainment
Touring Productions and Cirque du Soleil’s Guy
Caron to bring the Ice Age experience to the arena stage.
“There is an incredible fondness for the characters and
the stories,” says Jeff rey Godsick, president of Fox Consumer
Products. “It is our goal to create opportunities for the
public to fully immerse themselves in the stories they love
so much.”
Perhaps the centerpiece of the event is the Manny the
Mammoth fi gure that measures more than 11 feet in
height. The show will launch at London’s Wembley Stadium
on November 2 for what is slated to be a fi ve-year global tour.
“It’s going to be beyond anything that anybody could
possibly expect,” says Godsick. “This is much more than
ice dancing or acrobats. It’s going to have action, comedy
and amazement.”
The content of the show will draw upon all the major
characters from the movie franchise, but won’t simply
regurgitate past storylines. Instead, it will off er new plot
and character combinations. Tickets will retail for around
US$40 apiece, with full family package deals starting at
around US$200.
Batman bows stateside
Not to be outdone on the studio front is Warner Bros.,
which is working on Batman Live, another big arena spectacular
slated for North American debut this fall. It is the
fi rst full-arena show to feature the Caped Crusader. The
show, which has already played to half a million people
in the UK and South America, is on track to land in the
US in September and is being produced by Warner Bros.
Consumer Products, DC Entertainment and Nick Grace
of Water Lane Productions. Grace also co-produced the
arena tour of Mama Mia, which travelled the globe for
more than seven years.
“When the audience comes into an arena, they expect
an event,” says Grace, speaking from Rio de Janeiro. where
he was overseeing Batman Live’s Brazilian run. “We certainly
have an event for them.”
The production, which took more than three years to develop,
features a cast of 42 actors, a bevy of circus-trained
acrobats, a 3D Gotham landscape, a 100-foot-wide stage, a
105-foot-tall video screen and an original symphonic score
performed by 92 musicians and recorded at London’s famed
Abbey Road Studios.
“We designed the stage to be like a 3D comic book come
to life,” says Grace. “All the designs and illustrations are
hand-drawn and, of course, we have our own Batmobile.
You have to have a Batmobile.”
The set-up can work in arenas both big and small, will
usually have a fi ve-day run in each location, and is expected
to spend the next two years touring major cities in North
America, starting in Anaheim, California’s Honda Center
on September 5.
The show itself is a two-hour event with one 20-minute
intermission and, like all arena shows of this nature,
is designed to appeal to an entire family demographic, refl
ected in ticket prices that start at around US$25 each
and go up from there.
Grace believes he has found the middle-ground between
the hokey 1960s Wham! Blam! Batman and the darker incarnation
that has been a big-screen box-offi ce draw since
Batman Begins swooped into theaters in 2005.
“It is still totally faithful to Batman,” says Grace. “We
really take advantage of all the super villains in the mythology
like The Joker, Penguin, Poison Ivy and Harlequin—they
are all there.”
The story delves into the origin of Batman sidekick Robin
and was developed in tandem with WBCP and DC brass.
“They had complete involvement,” says Grace, speaking
to the nature of the co-production partnership. “From
script to costume design, they have 75 years of experience
with the Batman universe, and we wanted to make sure we
were totally faithful to it.”