Lord of the Rings: The Musical (No Joke!)

[Bêthberry]

Here's Michael Posner's article on the preview performance from last Saturday. Article from The Globe and Mail, Monday February 6,2006.

Perhaps the actors in stilts in the picture I posted previously are the Ents. Some time ago, rumours had it that the Black Riders would ride down through the audience towards the stage on some kind of stilt contraption. Who knows what wonders of stage machinery await viewers! And who knows what Tolkien would have made of that kind of machinery.

Originally Posted by Michael Posner

THE LORD OF THE RINGS THEY LIKE IT, THEY REALLY LIKE IT
MICHAEL POSNER

The critics' reviews are still several weeks away, but for the 2,000 people who constituted the first public audience of the most ambitious theatrical project in history, the verdict Saturday night was a decisive thumbs up.

No matter that the first preview performance of Lord of the Rings -- at Toronto's Princess of Wales Theatre -- suffered a couple of technical glitches that forced the show to stop for 15 minutes or so. And no matter that, when the curtain finally fell on the $27-million musical adaptation of the classic Tolkien novels, nearly five hours (including 50 minutes worth of intermission, accompanied by drinks and snacks on the house) had elapsed.

Although there were a handful of walkouts when the clock neared 11 p.m., interviews with audience members conducted before, during and after the show -- the Globe and Mail was the only media organization invited to actually watch the show -- suggest that this epic production will go a long way toward satisfying the enormous appetite for the inhabitants of Middle Earth.

"It's a thing of great beauty," said entertainment lawyer Brian Wynn, after the show ended with a standing ovation. "But the world needs to know what the concept is. It's not a musical. It's not a Stratford production. It's somewhere in between. If you come expecting a new Les Miz or Oklahoma -- it's not. But I think they've pulled out the poetry and the themes better than the movies."

"Very good," said Toronto teenager Andrew Buchanan who came with his father and brother. "The length didn't bother me at all. I want to see it again."

"It will be brilliant," said one woman who requested anonymity. "They have work to do, but I think it will be our next Phantom [of the Opera]," the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that ran for 10 years in Toronto. Although the Globe agreed not to review this first preview, it's fair to say that the world created by director Warchus and his creative team is unlike anything anyone has ever seen in conventional commercial theatre before.

The gnarled forests of Middle Earth thrust out to embrace the audience. The automated, cantilevered stage turns, twists, rises, falls and tilts in myriad and extraordinary ways -- at one moment, a winding forest path, the next, a soaring battlefield promontory, while wind and smoke swirl through the auditorium. Menacing orcs leap and tumble like pre-historic Raptors.

A dozen Ents --14-feet-high humanoid trees (actors on stilts) -- conduct a council of the forest.

Frodo and his fellow Hobbits run in fear of the ominous Black Riders. Michael Therriault is Gollum made animate, a writhing, wheezing, gymnastic incarnation of creepiness. The music -- jointly composed by the Finnish folk ensemble Varttina and India's A.R. Rahman -- owes more to opera than musical theatre, an almost continuous score that includes lush ballads, a rollicking drinking number (at the Prancing Pony Inn), a powerful anthem song, as well as the stirring, discordant strains of the battlefield.

Indeed, the show's sets, lighting (designed by Paul Pyant) and special effects (by Graham Meeh and Paul Kieve) were mentioned by many theatregoers as the single most stunning aspect of the production.

New York financier John Halle, who flew up for the preview, said the central question for him was whether audiences would tolerate a show that even at its optimum is scheduled to run three hours and 30 minutes with intermissions. Halle apparently couldn't; he left toward the end of Act II.

"Awesome," said Bruce Lovitz, an emergency room physician from South Carolina who flew up with his eight-year-old son, Carl, for the show. Calling himself "almost the world's biggest fan" of the novels -- he's read each of them every other year for 30 years. "It absolutely meets my expectation. I like the originality of the songs. My concern was that they would borrow too much from the movie versions, but they use just enough. . . . The books are so global -- they encompass the entire human experience, different facets of the human personality. It's a wonderful escape for us on this earth to escape to Middle Earth."

In his pre-curtain remarks to the audience Matthew Warchus explained that this was his second delivery in four weeks. A month ago, his wife had given birth to a Canadian son. "Births can be scary, unpredictable, painful and messy," Warchus said, "but there's nothing like being there at the beginning."