Bringing ‘MythBusters’ to stage

Just what kind of guys are Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman of the hit Discovery Channel TV series “MythBusters”?

They’re the kind that will put square wheels on a car just to see what happens.

“The question is: If you put square wheels on a vehicle, how fast would you have to drive to get a smooth ride?” Hyneman said. “In the beginning, you’re getting shaken all over the place. At some point, it ends up smoothing out.”

For nearly 10 years, the two special-effects experts have delighted a worldwide TV audience by blowing up cars and strapping crash-test dummies to homemade rockets, fearlessly testing urban myths. During the filming of an episode in December, a wayward cannonball left a Dublin firing range and bounced into a nearby neighborhood.

But how do you take a show like that onstage?

It’s problematic, but that’s exactly what they’re doing, with a nationwide tour of nearly 50 cities, including a  nearly sold-out show Saturday at Santa Rosa’s Wells Fargo Center for the Arts.

“We always said the key to staging ‘MythBusters’ live shows is that it’s an experimentation show. We don’t know what’s going to happen. So we wanted to somehow communicate that same energy onstage,” Savage explained. “We settled on having a lot of audience participation. We’re going to bring members of the audience up onstage repeatedly throughout the show, messing with their skills of perception.”

So don’t expect the often spectacular mayhem that takes place on the television show.

“There’s going to be fake explosions, for sure, but real ones, no. We’re trying not to involve the fire marshals in the cities we’re going to,” Savage said.

Last month, “MythBusters” made news when a cannonball fired at a target range veered off-course and tore through a residential neighborhood in the East Bay suburb of Dublin, damaging homes but not injuring anyone. During a recent phone interview, when questions about the cannonball incident came up, the tour’s publicists cut in before the duo could answer, saying interviews would be limited to the stage show only.

But shortly after the mishap, Hyneman and Savage visited the damaged area and Hyneman told news camera crews, “There will be no more cannonballs fired in this area again, at least not by us.”

During his phone interview, Hyneman did address the show’s philosophy about safety in general.

“There is a certain risk inherent in what we do, because it’s experimental. It involves often dangerous things, but we have safety protocols that we follow, and the longer we do this, I believe, the safer we get,” Hyneman said. “Every time we have a close call, we pay careful attention to it, and it won’t happen again.”

In the live stage show version of “MythBusters,” the adventure is more mental than physical.

“We engage the audience in situations where they think one thing is happening, but in fact, something else is happening,” Hyneman said.
Hyneman and Savage are satisfied that the tour remains true to the spirit of the show, even without car crashes or fiery explosions.

“What we’re doing instead is engaging the audience with some funny and thought-provoking experiments that we involve them in, and tease them with,” Hyneman said. “It is sort of a playful attempt at encouraging critical thinking.”

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at 521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. See his ARTS blog at arts.blogs.pressdemocrat.com.