As soon as Trudy Lou the Triceratops waddles on stage, it's obvious why size matters. This lavender lady is big and beautiful, and when she swings her six-foot long tail, the audience goes apoplectic. A parade of prehistorics — each with a distinct personality — takes over the Puppet Company Playhouse stage in Glen Echo Park through Sept. 6 in "The Dinosaur Radio Hour."

The show is part of Michele Valeri and Ingrid Crepeau's DinoRock Productions empire, now celebrating its 25th season. Their collaboration is a match made in hallelujah-heaven with Valeri playing the good-humored host to Crepeau's life-size creatures. Together, they create child-friendly shows filled with jokes and songs as well as an educational component, which Valeri insists isn't a "hit-you-over-the-head" learning experience. Crepeau has an enormous job; she not only designs but also creates and wears the fabricated dinosaurs suits, some weighing as much as 95 pounds.

For most audiences, an old timey radio show, complete with a 1940s microphone and vintage radio the size of a podium, is as prehistoric as the dinosaurs. But Valeri recalls spending hours listening to radio shows, and sees the humor in creating a visual show for a make-believe radio audience.

And besides, the "Radio Hour" is much more than an homage to the WDINO radio station. Valeri, Crepeau and their sidekick puppeteer Steve Little are here to entertain the mostly preschool age children sitting cross-legged on the theater's comfy carpeting. Passivity isn't part of the deal; instead, it's all about interaction. Valeri asks questions and youngsters shout back answers. Before even one child becomes slightly restless, Valeri has them "stretch and sniff" by following Trudy Lou's example.

All this movement has a point. Valeri asks, "How did Triceratops learn to survive?" and teaches them to answer: "They exercised to stay alive. We call it running for our lives. We call it exercise." As the children recite this mantra, a sea of tiny arms flutter toward the ceiling.

Soon everyone is singing "Who let T-Rex out?" to the tune from "Who let the dogs out?"

Valeri's mild-mannered approach is an important balance to the more complicated creatures she encounters during her radio show. One is painfully shy, another belligerent, while a few are simply incomprehensible.

Drama ensues once six-foot tall Ozzie the Ostrich (Little) waltzes on stage. Seems Jacques the Elasmosaurus has a major problem. Gliding through his oversized aquarium home, the long-necked marine reptile spits a stream of water into the audience, then demands to know why Ozzie is part of the production since, like himself, he is not a dinosaur.

Untangling this problem takes some maneuvering but soon, Valeri moves on to another health message. She asks her radio audience "Do you have twigs in your teeth? Meat in your molars?" She brings out a dinosaur-size container of floss and mimics flossing her own teeth.

While exercise and good hygiene are important, the show's creators also attempt to teach a little paleontology. After the bones of the six-foot tall Utahraptor were found in Utah some seven years ago, Valeri and Crepeau decided to create a new character. Their Dr. Utah, the Utah raptor, steals the show with his bright colored sneakers and gold chains. Maybe it's the music or the beat, but as the performers start singing, "He's not the lost raptor and he's not mean," Jen Bester can barely contain her 15-month-old daughter Sophie as she jumps up and down in her mom's arms and waves her hands.

DinoRock's dinosaur-puppet shows began in 1984, when Valeri and Michael Stein were asked to write songs for the newly opened dinosaur exhibition at the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum.

"I didn't like dinosaurs," Valeri admits.

Yet during her search for inspiration, she heard a preschooler at the Smithsonian exhibit rattle off the dinosaurs' scientific names, and knew it was time for some serious research. To this day, she says, "children tell me if I am doing something wrong."

Once the songs were completed, the museum asked Valeri to produce a children's production. She enlisted Crepeau, the Emmy award-winning puppeteer who was "crazy about dinosaurs" and claimed to be "one of the few girls who played with dolls and dinosaurs."

Crepeau had a clear vision; she wanted to make life-size puppets. At first, Valeri wasn't enthusiastic, and realizes now that she "fell backwards into my future."

Soon the two women, along with Stein, who left DinoRock five years ago for opera, were creating numerous dinosaur-themed shows and performing at the Smithsonian and then throughout the country. Valeri wrote scripts and songs, while Crepeau worked on her characters' foreign accents and creating costumes that were easier to maneuver. Lumbering around half blind wearing a bulky costume on stage isn't easy.

"Once I fell off the stage," Crepeau recalls.

Just before the tumble, she heard a voice say "Ingrid, look out," and down she went, some five feet off the stage. Fortunately, she bounced back up uninjured.

Returning audience members still remind Valeri of the day an eyeball fell out of a dinosaur's eye socket and rolled across the stage. Valeri was talking to the dinosaur and looked up and saw the empty hole.

"You have to acknowledge it," she explains and quickly ad-libbed, "I've never looked down at a stage and had it look back up at me."

Crepeau, unable to see everything happening on stage, managed to figure out what happened, and repaired the wayward eyeball after the show.

With all the complex mechanics of each puppet, snafus are inevitable. Crepeau spent years attempting to create Gracie the Nigersaurus, whose head and long neck are counter-balanced with a catapult device. Once, while performing at the Music Center at Strathmore, the pulley system wasn't working correctly, and while Gracie was supposed to turn her head and face the audience, she kept leaning to the right away from them.

Valeri quipped, "I never knew a right leaning dinosaur."

Despite using sophisticated engineering, Crepeau, 60, acknowledges that her body is taking a beating. She recently had knee replacement surgery.

"I can't do this when I am 70," she acknowledges, but she is not ready to retire just yet.

Some children are so taken by the dinosaurs they believe they have witnessed the real creatures. One youngster confided to Little that she had seen a dinosaur in the woods rehearsing for the show and fed it meat.

Even after five years of performing with DinoRock, Little won't forget that moment.

"She was so sweet," he says,

DinoRock Productions presents "The Dinosaur Radio Hour" Saturday and Sunday, 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m.; Wednesday through Friday, 10 and 11:30 a.m. through Sunday, Sept. 6, at the Puppet Company Playhouse, Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd. The show is recommended for children, ages 3-1/2 through fourth grade. Tickets are $10. Call 301-634-5380 or www.thepuppet.com.

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