For Valentine’s day, I had a little surprise for Henrieke! You see, in January, my mom and my nieces went to see Ice Age Live. Everyone else uninterested, except me of course, knowing that even if the show turned out to be boring, the costumes would be amazing!

Well, it turned out I was utterly impressed by everything, the show was super entertaining and left little to be desired!

Naturally I would’ve loved to watch it with Henrieke and I had to hold myself back with bursting out about how awesome I thought the show was. Seeing in the Netherlands was no option as we would be in the U.S. by the time the show was there, but I didn’t give up that easily and found out that it was played in Oberhausen, Germany, a bit more than an hour from Henrieke’s house! I quickly snatched some tickets for the show on Valentine’s day, booked some flights and looked forward to a nice surprise!
I even managed to keep it secret, Henrieke didn’t guess it until we arrived at the venue! 🙂

Anyway, to the show and why I enjoyed it so much!

The costumes

Other shows I know make large compromises with their costumes and stick to abstract designs in order to give the performers more freedom or simply because their costume designers are not very good. Well, in this case, the costumes were absolutely true to the movie and everyone performed incredibly. In fact on some photos I saw before the show I had to look closely to see if it was CG or costumes.

Compare this

to this

Both shows are aimed at kids primarily, but one of them doesn’t have creepy human body parts sticking out of their characters.

They did have some fighting scenes that were impossible to do with these detailed costumes, so their solution to this was that with some costumes (Diego and the Birds) the performers would wear simpler costumes under their bigger costumes and quickly switch (on stage) for those scenes. I found it kind of odd at first, but actually a pretty nice solution and definitely better than “half-assed” costumes for the whole show. Also they included some nice acrobatics in their performance which is always fine with me!

The performance

Kudos to everyone on ice, the vision in those costumes couldn’t have been good. Doing a solid performance on ice where bumping into another performer would be very bad, all while you have a lot of light shining into your eyes, that’s an achievement! At one point there were about 30 performers on the stage, all with limited vision, yet perfectly choreographed!

I can’t decide whether I liked Sid’s or Peaches’ performance better, in any case Peaches was definitely more adorable! Sid moved just like in the movie, combined with the super-on-model costume it was a fantastic performance! All the other characters also were really lively!

The story

If you go in and expect an amazing story, you might be a bit bummed by the simplicity of the story. Honestly, I didn’t care about the story at all as it was basically just a device to get all the characters into various situations0!

The many different aspects

I loved that the show had something for everyone. Adorable costumes, cheesy music, great character performance, some pretty bad-ass ice skating, acrobatics, even more impressive acrobatics in 2-person costumes and more. Definitely something that both kids and adults can enjoy, and looking at the people in the audience, everyone did.
For me, another thing to enjoy was also the amazing craftsmanship of the costumes, and thanks to our seats just a few meters from the stage we had a very good view on that.

A whole load of photos is behind the cut!

Conclusion: If you ever have the chance, go see it! 😀 The tour goes until 2017, so I’m sure it’ll stop in most countries!