The Lord's Flair

"So, is Toronto excited about the opening of The Lord of the Rings?"

A BBC radio reporter put this question to me on the eve of the gala, March 23 opening of the staged version of the J.R.R. Tolkien fantasy classic. Such a condescending question, delivered in the queenliest English, would make anyone feel like an unsophisticated colonial. “Well, yes, I suppose so,” I blubbered, more than a little defensively. “There’s the usual red carpet opening night, the pullout sections in the local newspapers. I mean, it is the most expensive musical ever produced anywhere.” Cringe. I sound like a publicist.

In truth, as I went on to explain, everyone in Toronto was simply too worried to feel excited: breath was held, shoulders were tensed, unmentionable muscles were clenched. One more local failure — like the indigenous productions of Hairspray and The Producers — would seal the city’s, and country’s, fate as a theatrical also-ran.

But what a horse to bet it all on. It was, after all, a technological and artistic reach even to translate the sprawling trilogy of The Lord of the Rings to the relatively flexible medium of film. In the annals of bad ideas, putting on a musical version of this adventure story on a static stage has got to rank right up there. Bring on the orcs doing the can-can, would you? Highbrow theatre buffs wouldn’t warm to such a low-caste property (such snobs have always eschewed Tolkien’s books). And fervent fans of the books and films would feel out of place in the hoity-toity precincts.

Well, breathe out, relax, unclench. The Lord of the Rings is the most inventively staged show in history — as, indeed, it needed to be. The production’s pyrotechnics make all those gasp-inducing moments from blockbuster shows past seem primitive. That chandelier dropping in Phantom of the Opera? Pshaw. That helicopter landing in Miss Saigon? Ho hum. That revolving stage in Les Misérables? Puh-lease. More than that, these greatest hits of stagecraft seem gimmicky in hindsight. They don’t flow from a coherent vision of the source material in question or bear witness to a singular, original aesthetic — as LOTR’s gobsmacking special effects do.

But staging isn’t everything — this show is currently (with apologies to Trooper) a three dressed up as a nine. The production’s substance still lags far behind its streaking style; the script and music both need a radical overhaul before the show can live up to the gloriously shifting, almost living stage on which it is set. Still, the raw material is there — the writers captured the essence of Tolkien’s modern-day myth cycle and a talented cast composed of slumming Shakespearians and circus-trained acrobats have breathed life into the resulting book and music.

Tolkien himself doubted that a theatrical version of his quest story could ever succeed, worrying that too much creaky stage business would prevent the audience from falling under its spell. His doubts — at least on this front — would have been allayed from this production’s first moments. Before the show starts, several hobbits (short actors, dressed like Morris dancers), play heedlessly throughout the theatre, catching fireflies with nets and skipping to my loo. (For the ignorant: hobbits are Tolkien’s pint-sized nitwits, the naïve, little creatures who stalwartly manage to accomplish tasks beyond the wise and the great.) Bleeding out from the stage proper is a faerie forest, a bramble of tree limbs, which obliterates the stage’s hard edges, further minimizing the border between us and them.

And what a world of wonders awaits. There are the dwarves’ underground cities (columns of burnished silver support its ceilings), the elves’ treetop home (set under a glowing canopy of shining and falling stars), gloomy forests (with living, talking trees portrayed by actors on stilts), and sunny meadows (the show’s lighting is particularly effective). The dark lord’s emissaries lumber about astride terrifying mechanical horses. The quest’s ingeniously evoked difficulties include snowstorms (vast white sheets representing deep drifts), hideous orcs (post-industrial mutants, bouncing around on prosthetic limbs pioneered for amputee athletes) and a giant spider (a puppet held aloft by cast members carrying each of its many legs). Huge skirmishes rage on a stage that’s ever morphing, sometimes spinning like a massive Lazy Susan, sometimes rising up to represent a mountainside, other times flattening out to serve as a battle plain.

It’s a pity, though, that we’re always racing through these often extraordinary scenes. Tolkien purists are already carping about the cuts in the plot, but more are needed. Although it currently clocks in at three and a half hours, it doesn’t feel too long; but it does feel too rushed. The key scenes need time to breathe; many of the secondary ones need to be axed to make room. There’s an almost overwhelming sound and fury surrounding the central storyline. Essentially, Tolkien intended to write a mythology for England, in which ordinary people, plodding along, observing ordinary virtues, outdo extraordinary ones ambitiously shooting for the stars.

In both the books and the play, the quartet of hobbits (admirably portrayed by Peter Howe, James Loye, Owen Sharpe and Dylan Roberts) serve throughout as our stand-ins, bumbling through, thankfully undercutting the pretentious tone adopted by the assorted wizards and warriors. After one of the big folk grandly pronounces a prophecy in rhyming couplets, one of the little guys will invariably chirp up, “What’s for supper?” (One can’t help but hope for the play to reach Broadway, since the jokesters at the satirical Forbidden Broadway would get even more mileage out of the show’s grandiloquence.) The trilogy’s longtime popularity with the young partly rests on such readers’ identification with the hobbits — and there’s no reason why unusually attentive youngsters shouldn’t enjoy the stage version.

In the production’s present headlong state, the performances are largely beside the point: many of the nation’s top stage actors are wasted in their one-note cameos. Yes, Michael Therriault garnered deserved ovations for his portrait of the ring-coveting grotesque Gollum as a hunchbacked schizophrenic, and Brent Carver grew in majesty as his character, the wizard Gandalf, gained ever greater magical power — and acquired a fuller beard! But their acting efforts were dwarfed (pardon me) by the outsized set’s many transformations. Similarly, the Enya-esque score, jointly composed by Finland’s Värttinä and India’s A.R. Rahman, wouldn’t, by itself, compel attendance.

The ingenuity of the staging is the show’s real raison d’etre, its medium and message, its alpha and omega. I first read the books when I was in my early teens, vividly imagining the various locales. Even my best interior visions, though, even Peter Jackson’s computer-aided transformation of New Zealand, couldn’t hold a candle to the experience of being physically immersed in this version of Middle Earth.

The Lord of the Rings is currently running at the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto.

Alec Scott writes about the arts for CBC.ca.