Sunday, November 4, 2012

Ice Age Live, A Mammoth Adventure....!!

 Co-directed by Guy Caron and Michael Curry, whose past credits include Cirque du Soleil, the show incorporates giant animal puppets, human acrobats and ice-skating dance numbers.

The plot is only tangentially related to the movies. It opens with cute baby mammoth Peaches being kidnapped by an evil hawk-like creature called Shadow, an all-new character in the Ice Age pantheon. Her father Manny sets off to rescue Peaches, aided by two other series regulars, the comedy sloth Sid and the saber-toothed smilodon cat Diego, with occasional cameo appearances from the super-sized squirrel Scrat. Their mission is successful, but on the way home the team encounter avalanches and rockfalls, diverting them into a kind of fantasy underground kingdom.
The character design is the most impressive aspect of Ice Age Live!, especially the three mammoths, giant constructions who move using a combination of internal human operators and animatronics. Several of the acrobatic musical numbers are also spectacular, particularly a quartet of dancing polar bears, a Bollywood-style set-piece inside a giant flower, and a team of arctic foxes whirling across the ice like vintage Busby Berkeley babes. None of these has much relevance to the plot, nor to the Ice Age films in general, but at least they add visual zing to a fairly slight story. Otherwise, however, this production feels woefully basic for such a major movie spin-off. Framed by a broad arch of glacial ice, the uninspired stage backdrop is a series of almost interchangeable, digitally projected landscapes. The stage itself is a rectangular skating rink filling almost half the main floor of Wembley Arena, although most of the action takes place on a series of moving platforms on top of the ice. The musical score, a mix of anodyne soft-rock ballads and rousing orchestral tub-thumpers in sub-Elmer Bernstein mode, is adequate but unmemorable

No comments:

Post a Comment