Ain't no Sesame Street that's for sure

Well our tour of live kid shows concluded yesterday afternoon at the State Fairgrounds. We saw Dora The Explorer Live : The Pirate Adventure. I think Brooke enjoyed it, but it was pretty lame compared to the Sesame Street Live performance we saw a few weeks before.

First of all the arena wasn't nice at all. It's where they do barrel racing and such at the state fair. It's just an old concrete building with worn out seats. They had the stage sitting a towards one end and then had rope strung from one each side of the stage towards the upper deck seating with black sheets hanging off.

The setup of the stage was terrible. The Sesame Street Live stage was big and open and they had a piece of the stage that jutted out off the main stage. So basically every seat could see everything. Not at Dora! We were up in the first few rows in the stands and couldn't see things on the side from time to time. The worst part was the last act with the pirate adventure boat. For some unknown reason, the didn't have the boat in the middle of the stage. It was off to the side... so we couldn't see Ilsa The Iguana at all during her performance of 'Ilsa Turn The Wheel'. There was no point in not having the boat in the middle of the stage, but that's how they did it.

The characters weren't very good either. Boots was a black guy that whined alot. Dora looked pretty good. The other characters really sounded nothing like the animated characters in the TV show.

You also weren't allowed to take photographs because it could harm the performers... so apparently the people playing Cookie Monster, Elmo, Big Bird, etc can handle photographs better than the Dora performers. Sheesh!

As usual we bought some merch. We ended up getting her two stuffed animal characters that we have never seen anywhere. A Benny The Bull and a Tico The Squirrel. They also gave little Pirate Adventure flags to every ticket holder.

We went to Earls afterwards for dinner which was pretty yummy. Chopped brisket sandwhiches... and Brooke ate two french fries, a bunch of ketchup with a spoon, and spit out her brisket (crazy kid!).