Bringing this 20-foot, 1.1-ton behemoth to life on Broadway are 14 puppeteers and computer technicians, along with 16 microprocessors, 16,000 connections, and nearly 1,000 feet of electrical cable built into the beast. Kong took years to perfect through concept design, prototyping, and testing, but the final version took about six to eight months to construct, according to Creature Designer Sonny Tilders, the man who led the team that built the ape. Ten of the puppeteers are known as the King’s Company and move with the beast onstage, using their weight and movements to move Kong’s lower body and arms.

When the ape needs to lift an arm high, one puppeteer climbs up his back and dives from his shoulders with a rope in hand to help create the effect. These 10 actors are also part of the cast when not on Kong duty.

There were times, of course, when it didn’t seem like it would ever get to this point, says Tilders. “This was a daunting task to do for the stage and concerns grew at the start of the project that it might just be too difficult,” says the man who is plenty comfortable working with big puppets. He’s the creative director of Australia’s Creature Technology Company, the outfit responsible for designing and building the full-size animatronic dinosaurs in the arena show, Walking With Dinosaurs, that launched in 2007 and proceeded to wander across four continents.

“Our history as a company was one of making very realistic creatures with an attention to detail and sophistication of movement usually reserved for film animatronics,” Tilders says. “Apart from anything else there was a risk that the technology would overshadow everything we were trying to achieve dramatically,” he says. It also wasn’t clear how the initial Kong design would work with actors on the stage, so the concept of being as realistic as possible was scrapped and the team moved toward a more theatrical outcome.

One of the inspirations for Kong and the King’s Company came from the 2007 play War Horse, which featured nine full-size horse puppets, each controlled by two or three people onstage. “Puppeteers seen openly manipulating the stunning horse puppets quickly disappear as they become one with the creatures they are controlling,” Tilders says. “It gave us the confidence to embrace exposed puppeteering solutions.”