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With oversized puppets who sing, dance and talk about saving the earth, “The Great Dinosaur Mystery” teaches children a lesson about their future.

Produced by DinoRock Productions, the musical romp takes audiences on a paleontological journey in the basement of a museum, where a pair of detectives hunt down a trail of clues left behind by a mysterious character named Tootsie to show the audience what the earth was like before humans came along. Along the way, a cast of wide-eyed, colorful dinosaurs, each with its own song, helps them out.

Michele Valeri plays Dr. Vander Plastercaster, who sings alongside the dinosaurs. Behind the scenes, she is one of the show’s writers and DinoRock Production cofounders and has watched the show evolve during the past two decades.

“The Great Dinosaur Mystery” was written in 1991, with themes of global warming, conservation and taking care of the earth, Valeri says. As the green movement has gained momentum, she has noticed the audience react more to the show’s subtler messages.

“It feels like it has become a much more serious issue from what it was 20 years ago,” Valeri says.

Over the years, the show has been adapted only slightly, mostly out of consideration for Ingrid Crepeau’s knees. Crepeau voices the eight different puppets that appear on stage, sometimes three at a time, and is also one of the company’s co-founders. With characters like Lumpy and Bumpy the Pachycephalosaurus towering over the human actors, Crepeau is constantly turning cranks to make parts move, relying on gravity and some “hip action” for others and hand stilts to make her arms the same lengths as her legs to walk on all fours.

“I get to tap dance on four legs,” Crepeau says of her closing musical number inside a dinosaur costume. “Depending on how exhausted I am, sometimes she taps brilliantly and sometimes it is sort of a ‘shuffle off to Buffalo.’”

Crepeau has been making puppets since age 6, and has always had a flair for grandiose creatures. Teaming up with Valeri 27 years ago to form DinoRock Productions has been a chance to create many of the critters from her fantasies.

“My father made me write a life list when I was 16 or so of puppets I’d like to make in my life and No. 1 on the list was a triceratops,” Crepeau says. Her dream was realized early on and she was challenged to create bigger and more elaborate creatures. She easily spends 400 to 500 hours making a large puppet of “Muppet” fleece that is dyed and painted on a structure of ethafoam before detailing.

“I probably spend 12 hours just making the mouths work right,” she says.

Crepeau’s talent for making large creatures look good has not gone unnoticed in the greater community. She also has a gig making clothes for the 6-foot-2-inch Washington Nationals eagle mascot Screech, including jerseys, baseball caps, shoes and even a tuxedo for his more formal occasions.

But Valeri is aware that bigger creatures can be scary to the young children that are their target audience. So one of her main roles is to act as an intermediary between the audience and the giant puppets, to provide a transition for the creatures to come out on stage.

“It is perfectly reasonable for someone to be afraid of someone whose head is twice the size of yours,” Valeri says.

While the initial shock might take some of the little ones a second to deal with, Valeri has never had an audience member who was seriously afraid of the puppets, which she attributes to the gentle way Crepeau crafts the eyes and faces of the dinosaurs. When something as scary as a dinosaur is morphed into something as accessible and loveable as a puppet, it becomes a very positive experience for a child, she says.

“They really do love the fact that they are big and a child who is in control of very little in little in their lives can be in control of something that big,” Valeri observes.

Another engaging part of the “The Great Dinosaur Mystery” is that the children are not allowed to sit idly by, but are asked to be a part of discovering the plot of the show, Crepeau says.

“Children are so used to watching television, and that bothers me. Sometimes you see a child with that stare; we call it the television stare,” she says. “So the actors try to get them out of the television stare. To say, this is happening, it’s live, it is right in front of you, and participate with us in it.”

DinoRock Productions has premiered all nine of their shows at the Smithsonian’s Discovery Theater and have sold more 100,000 copies of their audio recordings around the world. In 2000, The CD “Dreamosaurus” was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Musical Recording for Children. The CD for “The Great Dinosaur Mystery” won a Wammie back in 1993.

The DinoRock Productions will soon transition from prehistoric creatures to modern airplanes with a new puppet show they are developing about the young life of Amelia Earhart for the National Air and Space Museum this fall, Valeri says. The puppets will include airplanes such as Earhart’s iconic bright yellow open-cockpit biplane called The Canary.

With this dinosaur show, Valeri hopes that audiences will be able to learn from the past, without butting heads, like some of the dinosaurs did.

“The basic message from the show is that the dinosaurs are telling us is that if we don’t take care of the earth, we might end up going the way of the dinosaurs,” she says.

ccalamaio@gazette.net

DinoRock Productions’ “The Great Dinosaur Mystery” will run through July 17 at The Puppet Co. Playhouse in Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd. Show times are 10 and 11:30 a.m. on Thursdays and Fridays, and 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. The 50-minute show is recommended for pre-kindergartners to fourth-graders. Tickets are $10, with group rates available. Call 301-634-5380 or visit www.thepuppetco.org. For more information on DinoRock Productions, visit http://dinorock.com.