Growing up in the theater during the 1980’s I was a child of the mega-musical: an era where productions used special effects to enhance shows with simplistic plots. The last show I ever saw do this to do great effect, was the first national tour of Miss Saigon. That is until I saw the current touring production of the Tony award winning Best Play, War Horse, currently performing at Washington, DC’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
War Horse’s plot is simple; a boy grows attached to his horse named Joey, Joey gets shipped off to the front during World War I and the boy joins the army to find Joey. As one theater friend recently stated to me, “It’s the story of Shiloh retold with a horse.”
What makes War Horse so special is how the production team tells the story. Rather than using real horses (to0 tricky), stuff animals (too camp), they instead use puppets to great effect. The horse is life-size and the design is so successful that you feel the audience’s emotional attachment to Joey. For a non-speaking puppet, there was no doubt as to the kind of horse Joey would be in real life. I took a friend who was raised on a ranch in Nebraska to see War Horse, and even she remarked that what made the show so believable was the puppet’s behavior was so realistic.
Enhancing War Horse, and adding a sense of epic urgency to the story, is the fact that much of Act I and all of Act II takes place in the battlefields of World War I. Using a combination of lights, sounds and projections, the creative team takes the audience on Joey’s journey through War without using a literal stage design and going overboard on set pieces. This challenges the audience, in a good way, to use their imaginations to enhance Joey’s surroundings at the British and German fronts.
Watching War Horse I was transported back to my childhood when crashing chandeliers, a turntable, dancing cats and helicopters landing on stage brought the theater to life. Despite its critics, the mega-musical fueled my imagination and forever bonded me to live theater. War Horse doesn’t have a complicated story, what it has is a heart. And for one theatergoer, it was a journey back to childhood, all thanks to a life-size horse puppet named Joey.
To learn more about War Horse, or to purchase tickets, please visit: http://warhorseonstage.com/tickets/us_tour
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