WASHINGTON — The splendid beasts of the arena show “How to Train Your Dragon” roar and growl impressively during performances, but it’s unclear how deeply they think. If I were those dragons, this is what I’d be thinking: “We’d better enjoy our moment in the spotlight while we can. Remember pick-up sticks?”


“How to Train Your Dragon,” which is scheduled to be at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island next week and the Izod Center in New Jersey in September, is a big, brassy live version of the popular 2010 film based on Cressida Cowell’s books. Backed by DreamWorks with what must have been enough money to buy a small country, it features 23 lifelike dragons that stomp around, blow smoke and fly, all quite convincingly.


This is no small achievement, given that the largest dragons weigh at least 1.6 tons and generally require three operators, one in (actually, under) the beast and two working animatronic controls from the upper rows. Not too many years ago children were wowed when a dinosaur in a museum blinked an eyelid. These beasts, developed by the Australian company Global Creatures, make those dinosaurs look positively prehistoric.


I got to meet them backstage last Saturday before an afternoon performance at the Verizon Center here. It’s an eerie sight, all those very lifelike dragons sitting motionless, waiting for the lights to come up and the curtain to open. Somebody could film a pretty cool horror movie there, the menacing creatures threatening to come alive at any moment. I preferred to view the resting beasts as pensive, thoughtful. I imagined they were pondering — just as I was — the implications of what it takes to entertain a 10-year-old these days.


“How to Train Your Dragon” is a story in which a young Viking named Hiccup, who has been raised in a culture that is terrified of dragons and bent on exterminating them, realizes that the beasts can actually be quite friendly and can learn to welcome human passengers when they take flight. Hiccup’s hardest job isn’t training the dragon he befriends but convincing his fellow Vikings to change their worldview.


Bill Register, the show’s production coordinator, said the biggest dragons have a skeletal structure fleshed out with foam and covered with a hand-painted skin made of quilted spandex. The surface looks like armor, but in many spots it’s actually squishily inviting, like a beanbag chair. As Hiccup discovers, dragons can be quite huggable.


Some of the dragons inflate. Some flap their wings and fly. Some have special tricks, like the Gronckle, which blows smoke rings and, because there is apparently a law requiring all children’s entertainment to contain a flatulence joke, emits confetti from its hind end. At its best the show also includes fire effects, but Mr. Register said I wouldn’t be seeing those because of the Verizon Center’s code restrictions.


The show had its premiere in Australia and was first seen in the United States in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., late last month. Two dozen more stops are planned in the United States and Canada over the next six months. What does it take to haul such an elaborate production from town to town? Thirty trucks, Mr. Register said. The traveling cast, crew and management number almost 100.


Among the unheralded wizards in this show are the puppeteers at the back control area, making the dragons’ limbs and heads move. This isn’t a computerized show with the movements and sounds programmed in advance; it’s all done live, which requires considerable coordination among the people onstage and those in the booth.


“You can’t go on autopilot for any of this,” Gavin Sainsbury, the head of puppetry, explained from the control module — the crew members call it the Voodoo Lounge — while demonstrating the gear. That gear includes a keyboard that provides the noises the beasts make. On each key is written the sound made by that key: “Grr,” “Raw,” “Lowl.” There’s even a “Meow 1” and “Meow 2,” though you have to be listening pretty carefully to hear them during the show.