Mirvish's Lord of the Rings

Back in March, before I began this blog I went to see a preview of the Mirvish's Musical version of Lord of the Rings. I was on vacation and went into Toronto for the first time in years to brave busloads of high school students for a weekday matineé performance. All attempts to adapt J. R. R. Tolkien's 1500 page masterpiece suffer from the same problems--a story with over 150 characters; 9 orders of creatures who each have their own languages, customs, history, and living arrangements; an invented world that sprawls over hundreds of square miles under and above the earth and even in the trees; that takes place over the course of several years with flash backs to events thousands of years before. Every attempt at adaptation has had to face the same dilemma: only those who already know the storyline can hope to follow a plot this complicated; but Tolkien aficionados will always be disappointed by the number of their favourite scenes and plot-lines that are inevitably cut in order to make the result a workable length. Over the years I've seen several attempts; on stage, animated and live action movies; at adapting both the Ring Trilogy and it's prequel, The Hobbit. Of course anyone interested in attending the Mirvish Production will probably have seen Peter Jackson's 12 hour, $700,000,000 magnum opus. Modern computer techniques have made possible what previous versions couldn't possibly accomplish but even this version was forced to be selective about the plot lines it covered.

The first thing that strikes anyone who goes to the Princess of Wales theatre is the thirty-foot gold ring plunked in the centre of the security curtain onstage. Backed by scrim and surrounded by intertwining twigs which extend on all sides right to the first seats in the side balconies and the dome in the ceiling this ring dominated the theatre. Given the production's three and one-half hour running time with 2 intermissions the second impression is made upon the seat of one's pants. Thanks to battery packs, radio mikes, and a state of the art sound system no number of unruly students prevents one from hearing what happens onstage. As usual there is a live orchestra but only the conductor is visible to the audience. The action onstage begins immediately as the first audience members are admitted to the theatre with Hobbits wandering up the aisles and performing business onstage culminating in the chasing of laser fireflies with various sized nets; and continues unbroken as the house lights dim and the lights come up onstage.

This was, after all, a musical and musical numbers and choreographed business predominate. Enough 'smoke' is used during the course of 3 and a half hours that they must be buying the oil by the 45 gallon drum. When the balrog appears, just before the first intermission, smoke and fire in the form of black crepe are blown out over the audience in a 60 mph gale of hot air that could only have been created by firemen's smoke evacuators or a small jet engine. The bits of crepe reached our seats in the 'gods'. The revolving stage is sectioned into elements that can be raised up to 20 feet above stage level or dropped below it. The lighting effects boggle the mind. For $17,000,000, we get impressive set-piece highlights of the story but no sense of the whole.

At the time I wrote that as a musical this production was lacking in any memorable melodies, as a play the action was interrupted by too many extended periods of song and dance to be cohesive, and as a representation of Lord of the Rings the storyline didn't hold together. I was gratified to see that professional critics from Toronto to New York to London agreed with me. When less than a month later I was offered the opportunity to buy half-price tickets for myself and all my family and friends to come back to see it again it became obvious this production was in trouble. This past week it was announced that it is closing prematurely at the end of August for major retooling before a planned opening in London. As a production that had to run a minimum of 9 months just to break even, this gamble has definitely not paid off.

I will confess that as a genre musicals are not my thing. I love opera, but as musicals go I find that too often the action of the play is broken up by song and dance and as music too often the numbers are performed by actors whose musical ability is lacking or the play is performed by singers who can't act. That said I went to Lord of the Rings with hopes of seeing a reasonable adaptation of a story I love. That I and so many others were disappointed saddens me. The Mirvishes and their financial backers took a bath on this one and one can only hope their next production garners more success. Not even they can have pockets deep enough to weather too many flops such as this one.