Walking With Dinosaurs at the O2: Michaela Strachan’s really wild for hi-tech dino show

The £15m show returns to the London stage, bigger and better than ever before
A really wild show: Michaela Strachan stars in the spectacular Walking With Dinosaurs live show

It’s used to hosting titans of rock — but soon the O2 Arena will welcome dinosaurs the size of double-decker buses back to its stage.

Walking With Dinosaurs, a £15 million show charting the beasts’ reign through the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, is returning to Greenwich and then Wembley next year.

Michaela Strachan, the Springwatch presenter and former host of The Really Wild Show, will play a palaeontologist called Huxley in the production.

Eighteen dinosaurs, powered by hydraulic cabling and weighing up to 1.5 tons, will roam the stage, with star attractions including the tyrannosaurus rex, plateosaurus and stegosaurus.

Each is manoeuvred by three backstage technicians. The largest model, the brachiosaurus, is 35ft tall and 55ft long. A 50-strong team took more than a year to create the creatures.

Strachan said: “They are massive reptiles and we don’t have anything that comes near to their size. People have to stretch their imaginations to think what the world would have been like during the Triassic period. It’s such a huge spectacle that takes you back into that time.”

The show will depict Earth’s transition over 200 million years from the deserts of the Triassic period through the green prairies of the Jurassic, before a comet hits the planet at the end of the Cretaceous period, some 65 million years ago.

The spectacle, based on the hit BBC TV series, has been updated since it last came to the O2 Arena in 2012. Strachan, 51, said: “I’m starting off the worldwide tour in the UK. I’m really excited by it because I trained for musical theatre after I left school, and toured with Seven Brides For Seven Brothers when I was 19.”

Despite the dinosaurs’ enormous size, she said: “It’s always the tiny things that scare me, and the one that scares me most is the mosquito!”

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Sign up you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy notice .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in