Singapore will welcome a bevy of dinosaurs to our sunny shores in a couple of weeks, but it seems one of them couldn’t wait and showed up a little earlier. We’re at the press call for Walking With Dinosaurs – The Live Experience (WWD), which runs from Aug 29 to Sep 8, and the guest-of-honour for the day is a baby Tyrannosaurus Rex, or Baby T, as WWD director Ian Waller affectionately calls him.

The baby Tyrannosaurus Rex is among the 18 life-sized, life-like dinosaurs in WWD, a US$20mil (S$27.7mil) blockbuster stage production that’ll bring you up close to these massive prehistoric creatures, and is touted to be the biggest and best dino show in the world.

Based on the acclaimed 1999 BBC TV docu-series of the same title, Walking with Dinosaurs depicts the evolution of dinosaurs across 200 million years and will feature nine species, including the Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, and, of course, the mighty T-rex (“the headliner of our show”, Ian quips). The 100-min show has a storyline and it’s told by a fictional paleontologist called Huxley, and it takes you through various landscapes where volcanoes erupt, forests catch fire and culminates in the massive comet responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The largest dinosaur in the production is the Brachiosaurus, and measures 11m tall and 17m from nose to tail.

The utter realistic dinosaurs (or so we think) are operated by one to three performers by way of snazzy animatronics. Larger dinosaurs are controlled by three people from within the dinosaur. Smaller ones, such as today’s Baby T-rex (who only comes up to the knee of his mother, by the way), are manipulated by a single person who wears the costume.

Mama T-Rex with her baby. Feathers were added to the T-rexes after it was proven that the species did indeed have feathers.

Today, Baby T-rex is Neal Holmes (main pic), 35, a British puppeteer who was an ambulance driver and physical trainer in England before he auditioned for the job of a dinosaur puppeteer 11 years ago. He is one of five puppeteers on the WWD tour who don a range of dinosaur costumes — including raptors, the Liliensternus, and today, Baby T — for the live show.

“I honestly never even thought that the job of a dinosaur puppeteer even existed until I saw the job ad online,” shares Neal, who also dabbles in parkour free-running in his spare time. “I saw the ad, got an agent real quickly, got down to London for two rounds of auditions over a few days. A few days after, I got accepted and a few months later, we went on tour in the UK.”

8 DAYS: What’s it like inside the Baby T-rex costume?
NEAL HOLMES: It weighs 35kg and it’s on stage for about 15 minutes each show. I control the eye blinks, the sounds it makes, its mouth movements, and even the tail. The tail is connected to the back but you control it by the way you move. Inside, you’re stood up nice and straight, and wear the costume on your hips. There are also shoulder straps that are kept relatively loose so you don’t put too much stress on your spine.

You had to undergo six weeks of training and rehearsals in the beginning. What was the most challenging part about learning to be a baby dinosaur?
I’m used to it now, but at the beginning, the most challenging part was carrying this heavy costume with no visual idea [of where you’re going]. It felt very claustrophobic and uncomfortable initially, and your hands are in front of you and that feels a bit unnatural.

You rotate ‘characters’ with four other puppeteers. What are costume changes like backstage for a show like this?
We’re not running in to change costumes halfway during the show. We rotate, so I might do the raptor for the first show, then do Baby T for another show. But sometimes we do have to play more than one dinosaur in one show if we’re covering for someone who's sick or injured, but that’s very rare and we try not to do that to put the pressure on the team.

How much of a workout do you get each show, seeing as to how heavy these costumes are?
The Liliensternus is 42kg, Baby T is 35kg and the raptors are about 30kg. The Liliensternus is on stage for about eight minutes, and there are a lot of start and stops, slow movements mixed with a lot of sprints and fast movements. Baby T is on stage for 15 minutes and involves a lot of cardio. For me, that’s the hardest physically ’cos we are constantly moving and interacting as well. The Liliensternus, because they can’t steal the spotlight from the other dinosaurs, you’re still there but kinda out of the picture for a little while and then you come back in. The raptor scene is about three-and-a-half minutes. It’s a short scene but it has a lot of puppetry intricacies in it, and you have to work with another puppeteer as well.

How do you get into character, so to speak, before a show?
Over the years, [my pre-show routine] has become more relaxed. In general, we come in and do mainly stretching. I’ll have a little coffee in the morning, but I skip breakfast because we get fed at work. And if you’re doing the Liliensternus that day, you don’t want to have a big meal because you’re at the top of the show and there’s nothing worse than having a belly full of food and have a waist belt tied around you and have to sprint around [in a heavy costume]. These are little lessons you learn (laughs). If I’m doing Baby T for the evening show, I might have a little coffee.

Any mishaps on stage so far?
The worst one is falling over, and it’s happened to me a few times. You don’t go out there hoping you don’t fall over — you get pretty good at it with your balance, and you know where you’re going because it’s all blocked and choreographed for the most part. But sometimes when things take a little turn, for example, if you’re working with one of the bigger creatures and something goes wrong, they might take a different route to go offstage, and you have to be ready to get cues from the director or stage management to take a different route to work with it.

Getting back up after a fall must be a pain.
We usually fall on our side and we just have to lay down and two people will come and pick you up. Hopefully, we’re okay, and we can just come back and continue the scene. But we only have tights on and it’s a hard surface so you might twist or bang your knee ’cos the costume is heavy. [If we can’t finish the scene], there are contingency plans in place. Someone else might replace you and come back out to complete the show.

What are people’s first reactions when they first see you in the Baby T-rex costume?
Honestly, it’s different in every country, but generally, a lot of screaming (chuckles). Sometimes kids don’t know what to expect because these creatures are made to look very fluid and life-like, so people tend to be quite scared. But sometimes, people don’t want to look scared. In Bangkok, we got a lot of screaming. In Singapore, we’ve had some screams, but not as much as Bangkok. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing — it’s just a different way of reacting.

Walking With Dinosaurs – The Live Experience is on Aug 29 to Sep 8 at the Singapore Indoor Stadium. Tix from $78 from www.sportshubtix.sg. More info at www.dinosaurlive.com.

PHOTOS: Mark Lee and Walking With Dinosaurs