FOR THE KIDS : Play Offers Youngsters a Day With a Dinosaur : An 8-foot-tall, 14-foot-long robot version of a prehistoric creature stars in a musical at the Civic Arts Plaza,

Picture this, if you can: a Broadway-style musical show for kids about a wackyprofessor who invents a time machine and gets lost in the Mesozoic era, where he’s confronted by a huge, ferocious dinosaur.

As off the wall as it sounds, that’s what “Dinosaur Mountain” is all about. This musical adventure is at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza auditorium for one showing Sunday at 1 p.m. (Tickets are $11.50 and $9.50.)

Barney it’s not. The show, put together by the Philadelphia-based American Family Theater, includes an 8-foot-tall, 14-foot-long robotic dinosaur that menacingly flails about and roars.

But that’s not all you’ll get from the special effects department. The show’s creators have also simulated an on-stage earthquake. (For those of you still battling quake jitters, it’s near the end and supposedly can’t be felt by the audience.)

American Family Theater claims to be the oldest and largest producer of musical theater for kids. Formed in 1971, the company has a repertoire of 30 shows, with a dozen of them on tour at any one time.

The specialty is taking classics and adapting them to a style called “Broadway for kids.” Already this season, audiences at the Civic Arts Plaza have seen AFT’s “Beauty and the Beast” and “Babes in Toyland.” “Aladdin” arrives April 30, followed by “Pinocchio” on May 16.

“Dinosaur Mountain” is an original creation, written a couple of years ago by AFT’s Donald Kersey, who directs it.

“The idea came from the producers, who wanted a story about dinosaurs because kids like dinosaurs,” Kersey said. But creating a dinosaur for the stage was tricky.

“We thought it was a bad idea to put someone in a fuzzy suit,” he said. “We needed to give them something closer to reality--something like what you would find in a natural history museum.” So they had one made by California-based Dreamations Inc. Controlled by computer, it lumbers across the stage on a track, moving its head, mouth and limbs.

The story in “Dinosaur Mountain” is a little like “Back to the Future” and the Indiana Jones adventures. In fact, one of the characters is an archeologist named Nevada West.

As the show opens, the scene is a laboratory where a journalist named Larry Lane is interviewing a team of rescuers about to leave on a mission to find the missing Professor Wells. The nutty professor has never returned from a junket in his time machine to the age of dinosaurs.

So the rescuers, joined by the journalist, fire up their own time machine and flash back millions of years. In their search, they are hindered by the dinosaur. But all’s well at the end when they return with the professor just as the earthquake triggers a rockslide and knocks down a bridge.

Interspersed throughout the show are songs that Kersey described as “big band-style.” The theme of the show is teamwork and that comes through on a fast upbeat song repeated at the end. “Think About Something Else” is one the cast does when they hear the dinosaur coming closer. The cast dances and sings live to a tape of music orchestrated for the show.

The show, which lasts 75 minutes, is appropriate for preschoolers and up, according to AFT spokeswoman Adrienne Crane.

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“The Velveteen Rabbit” is back again. This time, it’s a theater production with songs by the Milwaukee-based Great American Children’s Theatre Company, presented at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza at 7 p.m. Wednesday.

In case you missed this classic, it’s based on Margery Williams’ story about a boy’s attachment to a stuffed bunny in England during the 1920s. Tickets are $6.50, $12.50 and $16.50. For information and tickets, call (800) 852-9772.

Details

* WHAT: “Dinosaur Mountain.”

* WHEN: Sunday, 1 p.m.

* WHERE: Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, 2100 Thousand Oaks Blvd.

* COST: Tickets $11.50 and $9.50.

* FYI: Tickets can be ordered by phone, 583-8700.