Hey everyone!  I just wanted to take a moment now that I'm home from the theatre to talk about War Horse at Lincoln Center here in NYC.  My guess is that most of you have seen the "making of..." videos on the web about the amazing puppets in the show.  If you haven't, look them up!

What a beautiful production.  The story is a bit weak and after a year, the production is a little tired, but the design and direction of the piece certainly compensates for those flaws.  Each life-size horse (a steel armature with a cane, leather, and scrim skeleton) has three visible, costumed puppeteers.  It takes about five minutes into the show to completely ignore the puppeteers.  As far as I was concerned, those horses were totally alive.  It was unreal what they were able to accomplish.  I grew up on a horse farm in Kentucky, so I'm pretty up on my horse mannerisms.  The puppets were spot-on, all the way down to the ear movements and even swatting flies with their leather tails.  The puppeteers even kept the horses in continuous movement to simulate the animals breathing---pretty remarkable!

By the end of the show (all two hours and forty five minutes of it), I admit it...I teared up a little several times for those puppets!  At the curtain call, the two main horse received the loudest applause by far---more so than any live actor!

If you're in New York and you have the opportunity to see War Horse, I say go!  It's been running over a year now and word on the street is that it's going to move out of Lincoln Center so they can revive The King and I.  I don't know if that means it will close or just transfer to a different theatre.  You never know up here.  The good news is that a national tour is about to hit the road, so those beautiful horses may soon be in a theatre near you! 

Just be prepared for some hard-to-watch animal violence (WWI was incredibly brutal) and make sure you have a pocket full of Kleenex!

These guys will be here next year. I think I will be saving some money to see it. (Hmm... this may be a good time to do my "do an interview for discount tix" thing )

I am so jealous.   Good news about it going on tour though! I'll have to keep my eyes open for if and when it comes to KC.

Well no official site yet really for the tour aside from FB it looks but it was announced that it would start out in Los Angeles, June 13 - July 22, 2012 then move on to San Francisco, Dallas, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and East Lansing.

I have my ticket for WAR HORSE here in Toronto on June 6th. I can't wait! It was my Xmas present to myself. I'll report back.

So it is in Toronto before Los Angeles... interesting. Articles I read mentioned it would head to Toronto but indicated it would be after the US dates. They really need to do better on their marketing.

Ok my bad! Their main site actually has the tour dates. http://www.warhorseonstage.com/tickets/us_tour In fact it also list appearances in other countries and it looks like the Toronto is a sit down production and not the national tour. Looks like they have a sit down in Berlin also!

I hope you guys enjoy it.  Like I said in my disclaimer (without giving anything away), if you have ANY issues with animal cruelty, you need to prepare yourself before you sit down in the theatre.  I'm an animal lover, but I can usually tough that sort of stuff out on TV, in movies, etc.  This performance was so lifelike and captivating (from the puppets, anyway), that it was really hard to watch at times.  Luckily for me, as a designer I can tune out the action and focus on the production design when I need to.  As far as that part goes...simply stellar.  No wonder it grabbed up five Tony's last year. 

No the it is based on the book. The movie in fact came out after the live theater production.   So really the movie was based on the live version in a way.

It's based on a children's novel from the early 80's.  The show opened first, and then the movie followed last Christmas.  Although they're based on the same plot, they are two unrelated productions.