Originally Posted by Kamal Al-Solaylee
Lord of the Rings: Sets shine but this is no jewel
KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE
Globe and Mail Update
The Lord of the Rings
Book and lyrics: by Shaun McKenna and Matthew Warchus
Directed: Matthew Warchus
Starring: Brent Carver, James Loye
At the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto
Rating: **
Who says inflation is under control? Nowadays, a budget of $28-million just doesn't buy you the rollicking stage epic it used to.
The Lord of the Rings — the musical adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy that received its world premiere Thursday night — may boast of its record-breaking cost, but it still looks a lot like unfinished business.
The blueprint for the adaptation — a heroic, if misguided, undertaking billed as a hybrid of drama, music and spectacle — is now in place.
All it needs is an engaging storytelling approach, an emotional arc, credible performances and a more coherent musical score.
In other words, what's missing from this adaptation is the essence of theatre itself as that divine place for sharing stories and forging emotional connections between the audience and the performers.
No man, elf or hobbit can compete with Rob Howell's mammoth set design. A rotating platform is just the beginning to a number of configurations that stand in for forests, mountains, caves and castles, all executed with awesome precision. Howell and director Matthew Warchus solve the problems of bringing to stage such fantastical "characters" as talking trees, dark riders and giant scorpions with exemplary resourcefulness.
This is the point in the review where a polite Canadian critic is obliged, given the scale of the show and Toronto's hopes for it as the bedrock of Ontario's "cultural renaissance," to cast the production as a noble failure. Not so fast. Warchus and his book and lyrics co-writer, Shaun McKenna, have been blessed with source material that has two magic theatrical words written all over it: journey and friendship. They waste both.
The journey is that of Frodo (James Loye), the hobbit entrusted with destroying a ring, forged by the Dark Lord Sauron, that has evil powers to destroy Middle-earth. The friendship is between Frodo and Sam (Peter Howe) as they set out to Mount Doom to throw the ring in its flames. The first leg of their journey is accompanied by the "fellowship of the ring," led by Gandalf the Wizard (Brent Carver). The latter leg is overshadowed by Gollum (Michael Therriault), the ring-obsessed former hobbit.
The details are too convoluted to fully get into here — the playbill comes with a 1,500-word, two-page synopsis — and despite massive cuts, the plot overwhelms McKenna and Warchus.
Their adaptation acquires the irritating drone of a speed-typing contest to see how many storylines can be crammed into three one-hour acts. Few, if any, moments are allowed to breathe onstage or hit their philosophical message.
Part of this show is a musical, so you would think the songs could elucidate what the script failed to accommodate. Not here. The singing interludes merely reiterate information easily gleaned from the synopsis or the stilted, faux-epic dialogue preceding them.
A typical example of the production's muddled thinking about music is a show-stopping (in the literal sense) song in Act 2 by Rebecca Jackson Mendoza as Galadriel. It sounds like any other power ballad in any Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. The rest of the score, by Indian composer A.R. Rahman and Finland's folk group Varttina, plays like someone has raided the world-music section at Indigo, picking up universal sounds and siren songs and hoping for the best.
The score's constant jumps from ethereal to radio-friendly fracture a production already suffering from patent gaps and cuts. You can almost sniff the glue holding it all together.
All of that would have been less troubling if the cast tackled the material with more fervour and elegance. As played by British actors Loye and Howe, Frodo and Sam are a pair of silly, silly hobbits. It's time for them to move from pastoral comic relief to the maturity entailed in accepting the ring's challenge.
It's very hard for the audience to invest emotionally in comic relief, and their journey therefore loses its mythic and physical powers.
Perhaps, one secretly hopes, our Canadian actors will do better. That feeling evaporates a few scenes into Brent Carver's appearance as Gandalf. This otherwise gifted actor is at best wasted and at worst at a loss. His delivery is rushed, lacking both authority and poise.
The other leading (and leaden) cast members are so underwhelming they might as well have been replaced by holograms. An exception is Therriault's free-spirited Gollum, but even he overplays the character's humour at the expense of its dark side.
Once again, the show is the set. Yet the triumphs of visual representation and conceptual design come at an exacting price since they eat up valuable stage time. They also raise expectations that routinely get dashed in the narrative portions. In a hybrid, each part is supposed to pull its weight, not drag the other down.
What elevated Peter Jackson's screen adaptations into solid works of art, as opposed to merely populist entertainment, was his determination to anchor the epic adventures and the special effects in well-defined relationships and strong acting. In cinematic terms, the latter is achieved with a simple close-up.
Theatre can't compete with film in that way. Nor should it. It can, however, beat celluloid to the punch in immediacy, simple stage effectiveness and direct, unfiltered emotional connections. Unless The Lord of the Rings addresses these issues before it transfers to London's West End, it will remain a pale imitation of the books, the films and, tragically, theatre itself.
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