‘How to Train Your Dragon’ A monster of a show

August 20, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

If the 2010 animated hit movie “How to Train Your Dragon” taught us anything, it’s, well, that it’s not easy to train a dragon. Now imagine trying to control on command nearly two dozen such animatronic creatures in a live show setting. The result is quite a monster production.

That’s what Resident Director Lynda Lavin learned over the past year in seeing the brand-new “How to Train Your Dragon Live Spectacular” come to fruition.

“It is a monster, but a fun monster, I’ll tell you that,” said Lavin, calling from Toronto. “But I don’t like to call our dragons monsters because they’re kind of friendly dragons. The creative staff did an amazing job of creating dragons that could move, look like they were real, had amazing personalities, could fly and breathe fire and smoke. This is a huge arena production with 23 dragons and 21 actors. It’s pretty state of the art technology to make this happen every night.”

The technologically-savvy brains behind the critically- acclaimed show — which comes to Pittsburgh’s CONSOL Energy Center Thursday through Sunday — is the innovative Global Creatures, which brought the international phenomenon “Walking with Dinosaurs” to the world a few years ago.

For “How to Train Your Dragon Live Spectacular,” the challenge was seamlessly creating a world of dragons, some with wingspans of up to 46 feet, and Viking warriors. To accomplish such an endeavor, world-class acrobats perform against state-of-the-art, wall-to-floor immersive projections measuring more than 20,000 square feet.

As for the story, the live production rolls fire-breathing action, epic adventure and heartfelt laughter into an original captivating story set in the mythical world of Vikings and wild dragons. Based on the book by Cressida Cowell, “How to Train Your Dragon” centers on Hiccup, a Viking teenager who doesn’t fit in with his tribe’s longstanding tradition of heroic dragon slayers. Hiccup’s world is turned upside down when he encounters a dragon that challenges him and his fellow Vikings to see the world from an entirely different point of view.

Lavin said not only does the production maintain the original “Don’t judge a book by its cover” theme of the Academy Award-nominated film but actually raises the bar in terms of live entertainment.

“We’re probably the largest arena tour out on the road right now, and it is a big game changer because we’ve incorporated many different types of technology,” said Lavin, whose credits include Broadway productions of “Grease” and “The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber in Concert,” as well as national tours of “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” “Chicago,” “Grease,” “Les Miserables” and “Phantom of the Opera.” “A lot of shows use one or another. We’ve put them all together to create this environment in the arena. We have a 3D video that plays throughout the entire show, and it’s without the glasses.”

Finally, considering Lavin’s experience, she’s the perfect person to answer the question we’re all dying to ask: Is it harder to train a dragon or stage a high-tech dragon show?

She laughed, “If I had my choice after this experience, I’d rather train the dragon than have to go through tech again on this show.”