From stopwatches to sleigh bells, here's how 'The Polar Express Train Ride' stays on track

Posture militarily straight, mustache neatly trimmed and familiar uniform smartly pressed, Cam Taylor picks up his lantern and prepares to take his post on a wooden stand a short distance from the Oklahoma Railway Museum’s train platform.

Before he greets the pajama-clad crowd of golden ticketholders facing what could be their “crucial year,” though, he has to wait for another train, of sorts.

Minutes before boarding begins for the latest trip on the “The Polar Express Train Ride,” crew members pass through rolling carts stacked with insulated carriers called hawkers, which already have hundreds of lidded cups of steaming hot chocolate tucked inside. As the behind-the-scenes cocoa crew quickly loads the hawkers onto the passenger cars, Taylor and his fellow cast members take their places for showtime.

“That's like the most iconic part of the show. … It wouldn’t be ‘The Polar Express’ without ‘Hot Chocolate,’” said Taylor, one of three local actors playing the role of the Conductor on the Oklahoma City “Polar Express Train Ride” this holiday season.

Fans of Robert Zemeckis' 2004 movie also know there’s only one rule when it comes to hot chocolate on “The Polar Express”: “Never, ever let it cool.”

So, precisely when the creamy beverage is brewed, dispensed and loaded has been carefully calculated to ensure that hundreds of passengers spread across six different train cars who are all getting to that beloved part of the immersive musical experience at slightly different times all still get a cup of cocoa that’s just the right temperature.

"They have a whole sheet that they follow,” said Nat Vorel, the local production manager for the OKC “Polar Express Train Ride.”

“It’s wild how they figured out the timing — and that’s for everything.”

The Oklahoman recently went behind the scenes at the Oklahoma Railway Museum to learn the way things happen on the OKC “Polar Express Train Ride”:

What is ‘The Polar Express Train Ride?’

A full theatrical show with a train car for a stage, “The Polar Express Train Ride” faithfully follows the computer-animated film based on Chris Van Allsburg’s medal-winning 1985 children's book.

The OKC ride runs through Dec. 27, with three to five performances a day departing from and returning to the Oklahoma Railway Museum. Powered by an actual locomotive, the popular yuletide attraction is indeed an hourlong round trip train ride that chugs through the woods and neighborhoods around the museum.

But the real magic happens inside the passenger cars, as the riders get to relive the classic holiday story, from having their golden tickets punched and encountering a cynical stowaway to meeting Santa Claus and receiving one of his silver sleigh bells as a gift.

“It's a theatrical show. But it's also an event: It's something that you go and experience,” said Bryce McWilliams, a production manager for Durango, Colorado-based Rail Events Productions, which coordinates “The Polar Express Train Ride” and other licensed special events for railroad and museum operators across the United States, Canada and U.K.

“It’s singing, it's dancing, it's jokes, it’s big dance routines with the ‘Hot Chocolate’ chefs. You get the hot chocolate and cookies … and when you're on a train, you're just there. You get to be in the world of ‘The Polar Express’ for a little while.”

How many people make the ‘The Polar Express Train Ride’ run?

Recreating the world of “The Polar Express” in real life means that McWilliams and his cohorts start thinking about Christmas about the same time everyone else is focused on Valentine’s Day.

“We start pre-production in February. Then, we really start digging into the scripts … in June,” he said.

Although the overall experience stays consistent from year to year, the producers annually tweak the show. Last year, they added a simulated Northern Lights experience to replace the viewing of the decorated outdoor North Pole set, a change they kept this season.

“We come in (to OKC) in August; that's when we do auditions. We have an open casting call,” McWilliams said.

“In most cities, we have around 50 cast members, and then probably 15 or 20 backstage crew and anywhere between 30 and 50 working in the front of house and parking and that sort of thing. We hire locally for the whole staff — and we stay in touch with them. We get reports every day from each city of how things went and what they saw and how the audiences are reacting.”

In his first time auditioning for “The Polar Express Train Ride,” Taylor won the coveted role of the Conductor for one of the three OKC casts that keep the attraction rolling all season. Rehearsals started Nov. 3 in the Boathouse District before moving onto the actual train, with the first performances chugging out of the museum on Nov. 11.

“We hit the ground running … getting the show on its feet, choreographing ‘Hot Chocolate,’ hearing the cues, hearing the sounds, knowing our tracks and knowing how everything was going to work,” Taylor said.

How do cast and crew members make ‘The Polar Express’ magic happen?

Holding his lantern aloft, Taylor stood tall on his wooden dais, peering through his wire-framed glasses at the new set of passengers streaming onto the boarding platform on a recent Saturday afternoon.

“All aboard,” he called out as the stewards rang their bells and “The Polar Express” soundtrack played.

Although the train hadn’t even left yet, Taylor’s time overseeing the boarding process would be one of the actor’s last chances to stand still until the locomotive chugged back into the station at the end of the performance.

To bring a fully immersive experience to six passenger cars at once, two of the three OKC casts perform simultaneously for each showtime.

Each car is assigned three cast members — a Steward, Bailey and a grown-up version of the Know-It-All from the movie — who mostly stay put, leaving only briefly for quick costume changes. The trio leads the passengers in games and carols, guides them through a reading of the book and sings the cinematic ballad “When Christmas Comes to Town.”

But the cast members who play the movie’s iconic characters — the Conductor, the stowaway Hobo, Santa Claus and the nameless protagonist called the Hero Child, who is a boy in the film but is played by both boys and girls on the train ride — are tasked with bringing the story to life in three different cars during each performance.

“It's like three shows going on at the same time, because those actors have to move from place to place and do their scenes in different order,” McWilliams explained. “So, it's really timed down to the second. We have our stage manager call the cues from a different car where they can't even see what's going on … so they have to listen from one car to the other and know exactly when to call cues and how to keep things moving.”

What goes on in the production car on the OKC 'Polar Express Train Ride?'

In OKC, the production car is conveniently located in the center of the train and serves all the functions of the backstage of a traditional theater. Throughout the recent Saturday performance, Stewards ducked in, pulled on chef coats and hats to perform “Hot Chocolate,” the production’s “kid wrangler” encouraged the Hero Child actors, and the two performers playing Santa waited for their grand entrances in the quiet former kitchen area, playfully dubbed “Santa storage.”

In the movie, Tom Hanks’ stern Conductor continually checks his pocket watch and reminds the other characters he has a schedule to keep. In OKC, stage manager Katy Sullivan sits at the long table dominating the production car with a stopwatch running on her laptop.

As she listens to the performers crooning “When Christmas Comes to Town” in Car 1, she consults the three-page color-coded spreadsheet that provides a minute-by-minute breakdown of what should be happening in each car. Although everyone gets essentially the same show, the different parts of it are staggered to allow the traveling performers to make their rounds.

“So, Santa’s in Car 2 through this whole song and ‘Jingle Bells,’ and in Car 3, they’re finishing the book and they’re about to switch over to the Northern Lights,” she explained, cycling through her audio feeds to check in on the different cars.

“You can see we already had the ‘Christmas Twist’ in Car 3 a while ago, but they’ll do it here in a bit in 1.”

For the passengers, boarding begins promptly at the time on their tickets, and the train is slated to leave the station — and the show to start — precisely 20 minutes later. It should arrive back at the museum and begin unloading passengers one hour later; on the Saturday of The Oklahoman’s ride-along, it was back at just one minute and a few seconds past the hour.

To keep “The Polar Express Train Ride” running smoothly for the actors, many of their cues are hidden in the holiday décor festooning the cars as well as in the train noises that ticketholders hear.

“Sometimes, it’s the lighting; sometimes, it’s ‘you do this on this train whistle,’” Sullivan said.

“It’s little cues that you don't notice when you're sitting in the audience, because it seems like it’s just ambience. But the Santas are (using them and) keeping track throughout the car. But they're also just very, very good,” Vorel added.

“It’s all like a well-oiled machine.”

‘THE POLAR EXRPESS TRAIN RIDE’

• When: Through Dec. 27.

• Where: Oklahoma Railway Museum, 3400 NE Grand Blvd.

• Tickets: https://okcthepolarexpressride.com.

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Polar Express Train Ride OKC: How it works behind the scenes