Time to pony up for a ticket to 'War Horse'

NEW YORK - At the end of "War Horse," the crowd at a recent curtain call rose to cheer a couple of real thoroughbreds. Not actors - horses. Humans are almost beside the point in Lincoln Center's staging of "War Horse," the astonishing World War I epic that opened Thursday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater following an award-winning run in London. The biggest claps here are reserved for a pair of equine puppets. Based on the best-selling 1982 children's novel by Michael Morpurgo and adapted by Nick Stafford, "War Horse" tells the story of the friendship between an English farm boy and his clever horse Joey set against the Great War. The puppeteers - three for the big horses, one or two for the others - provide the whinnies, snorts and snuffles of the animal in such an astonishingly lifelike way that their human manipulators - visible in period clothing - melt away. Created by the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa, the puppets are really more like exoskeletons with shredded leather for tails and pointy ears and limbs manipulated by levers and buttons inside. For adult horses, two humans are hunched inside the body and one stands alongside its neck offering the main sounds and moving its head. The audience meets Joey for the first time as a fearful foal and watches his relationship with his young owner, Albert (a hardworking Seth Numrich), deepen. When Britain is sucked into war, Joey is sold to the British cavalry and later captured by Germans on the Western Front. Albert - sent a sketch pad of drawings from the British soldier taking care of Joey - then joins the Army to find his beloved friend, risking his life among the barbed wire and cannon fire in the Somme Valley. The cast of 35 includes people - British, German, soldier and civilian - and puppeteers who manipulate four horses; some actors pull double duty as both horse and human. The stage at Lincoln Center can barely contain all the action and, indeed, both horses and human characters race up and down the aisles. The acting - human, that is - is a little over-the-top, but that's to be expected from material inspired by a kids' book. The reason to go see the show is its inventiveness, visual punch and its obvious reverence for the way animals move and behave. Look for a wayward goose to almost steal the show. Directors Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris have their hands full juggling both beast and Homo sapiens, and they have been aided by a reunion of the production's acclaimed London design team. A projection screen - cleverly in the shape of a torn piece of the sketch pad - hangs over the stage, showing lovely animated videos by Leo Warner and Mark Grimmer. The music by Adrian Sutton and songs by John Tams alternate from battle melodies to moving violin-and-accordion English folk. Paule Constable's lighting - particularly in the battle scenes - is heart-pounding and stunning. And put your hooves together for Toby Sedgwick, who is director of movement and horse choreography. The show opened in 2007 at the National Theatre of Great Britain and transferred to the West End two years later, where it is still selling out. Steven Spielberg is readying a film adaptation of the story with real horses. Layered on top of the boy-and-his-horse tale is an exploration of the way warfare changed during the war, as machines began replacing cavalry horses on the battlefield. One the most beautifully realized scenes in "War Horse" shows Joey facing off against a British armored tank. Columns of horses in another scene are cut down my machine gun fire. Joey and a rival-horse-turned-friend Topthorn make it across the enemy lines and find themselves in German hands, but they manage to charm a horse enthusiast and decent bloke named Fredrich (a fine Peter Hermann), who takes the sting out of a play which portrays German soldiers as mostly bloodthirsty. "I'm afraid magnificence isn't worth a damn, here," Fredrich tells his animals amid the mud and trenches. There are few dry eyes in the house at the conclusion of this tale and that includes both weeping gray-haired Lincoln Center subscribers and sniffling high school field trippers. And why not? There's no shame in crying over a love story between a boy and his horse, even if that horse is made up of cane and plywood. Plus, there's another secret ingredient in those puppets: plenty of heart. (AP)