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hesFrodo Gets Another Shot at the Golden Ring
May 13, 2007
Frodo Gets Another Shot at the Golden Ring
By MICHAEL WHITE
LONDON
AS Lady Bracknell might have put it, to lose millions on a show in Canada may be regarded a misfortune; to risk millions more by doing it again in England looks like carelessness.
But careless or not, the vast, expensive and (some would say) impenetrable song-and-dance staging of “The Lord of the Rings” that opened in Toronto last May and closed six months later without recouping its $25 million investment is about to be resurrected, this time in London at Theater Royal, Drury Lane, with yet another $25 million in backing and nerves of steel on the part of its production team. Previews began Wednesday, with an official opening next month.
Multilingual, multiethnic, multi-everything, awash with wizards, elves and hobbits, 40 tons of stage machinery, 500 costumes and 60 technicians, and lasting more than three and a half hours, the stage adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy was condemned by critics in Toronto as oversized, too long and too much to cope with. In The New York Times, Ben Brantley described it as “a murky, labyrinthine wood from which no one emerges with head unmuddled.”
The producer Kevin Wallace was unruffled in the Zen-like calm of his penthouse office high above Trafalgar Square: “What can I say? I believe in this show, I’m still with it. There were things that didn’t work, but we’ve made changes. We’ve listened to our critics, when they had constructive things to say. And Toronto was Toronto. In world terms a show doesn’t open until it plays London or Broadway, and we’re completely focused on making this London opening a success.”
Although the new version maintains the show’s spectacular technical elements, a lot else has shrunk. The running time, for instance, has been cut 40 minutes to a flat three hours. Minor characters have been axed, subplots stripped. And the show has been “lightened,” as the director, Matthew Warchus, puts it: not just in physical terms, so you can see it better, but in texture.
“We’ve rethought the speed and rhythm of the storytelling, to lift it,” Mr. Warchus said. “We’ve reassigned a lot of text to express feeling rather than give information. There was too much information to absorb. And we’re telling more of the story in music as opposed to words.”
Not that anyone involved is quite prepared to admit that it wasn’t a success in the first place.
“I’ve done 50 shows in my life,” said Mr. Warchus, whose Broadway credits include “Follies” and “Art.” “I know when something works with an audience, and it was clear to me that even with its flaws it did succeed. It just didn’t succeed commercially, for whatever reason.”
“As it was,” he continued, “we played to 420,000 people, 94 percent of whom filled in survey forms to say they loved it. And you’ll notice that no one on the creative team has been replaced for London, because we all have faith in what we’ve done. It’s the same people: rewriting, rethinking, developing the piece to the point where it’s reborn.”
Development and rebirth are preferred terminology within the “Rings” team for the remedial work they have done since the Toronto closing.
“Any show, however classic,” Mr. Warchus said, “is just a document of where the creators got to in the time they had — after which the process stopped, they crossed their fingers and waited for the reviews. If the response was good, that was it. If not, the process continued. As here.”
But having worked on the “Rings” project from its early days as both director and co-writer, Mr. Warchus also knows that there were fundamental problems all the way along. How do you squeeze three volumes of epic narrative into a single night of theater? How do you handle the scale? And how do you satisfy the expectations of an audience that will have seen Peter Jackson’s films and will want nothing less than wide-angle visions of Middle-earth erupting into tumult?
Mr. Warchus began from the position that just about any story can be staged, given imagination and ingenuity: “So yes, I thought ‘Lord of the Rings’ was viable as theater — and, no less, as music theater, because Tolkien’s books are full of songs. But there’s so much in them, we obviously had to be selective. Otherwise the show would just be a hysterical series of headlines. And we had to find a tone for the piece that would address the heroic content. That, for me, was the issue.”
The Wagnerian qualities of “The Lord of Rings” made it especially unlikely material for Broadway or the West End, where, as Mr. Wallace said, “the current trend is for shows like ‘Hairspray,’ ‘The Producers,’ ‘The Full Monty,’ that address their audience in nods and winks. It’s all self-deprecation.”
Certainly, Mr. Warchus said, it would have been easier to stage “The Lord of the Rings” as a spoof. “You’re facing a collective cynicism in the audience, and I decided early on that there was no point in trying to hit them over the head with earnest insistence,” he said. “I’ve looked for humor in the story, and the hobbits are useful for that. But otherwise I’ve tried to break down the cynicism with enchantment: an embracing theater magic that invades the whole auditorium and reduces the audience to childlike amazement. There are plenty of stops you can pull out in theater magic, and we do.”
Mr. Warchus said the plan was never to do a staged imitation of the films; only the first film had been released when the project was begun.
“My aim hasn’t been to get ‘Lord of the Rings’ onstage so much as to make a fantastic piece of theater with ‘Lord of the Rings’ as its excuse,” he said. “If you pinned me down, I’d say the result was Shakespeare meets Cirque du Soleil.”
But also in the mix is the tradition of medieval mystery plays, in which the members of the audience must do some work, completing in their minds symbolically suggested stage pictures. Mr. Wallace calls it “poor theater,” which is odd terminology for a show with 17 hydraulic lifts but in this case means creating giants with puppetry and people on stilts rather than animatronics.
Mainly, Mr. Warchus said, the new London version represents a shift in emphasis designed to address the audience in emotional rather than intellectual terms, and to make better use of a cross-cultural score that evokes the “otherness” of Middle-earth: part Indian-ethnic, by the Bollywood composer A. R. Rahman; part Euro-mystic, by the Finnish folk band Varttina.
“It’s become more truly a musical than it was,” Mr. Wallace said. Still, there aren’t many showstoppers.
Whether it wins over Tolkien fans in Tolkien’s homeland won’t be clear until the show opens on June 19. As Mr. Wallace says, Toronto can be written down to experience; London is what counts. And perhaps it’s luck that London didn’t play host to the premiere in the first place, as he had intended.
“The sole reason it went to Toronto,” he said, “was that there were only three London stages big enough to take the show — the Lyceum, the Dominion and Drury Lane — and none was vacant at the time.”
Now Mr. Wallace has the theater he wanted all along. But even Drury Lane has problems with a show this big. He has been forced to take out its historic stage machinery to make room for his own: a drawn-out process of negotiation, excavation and archival work, policed by English Heritage officials.
“And I’ve had to finance a complete upgrading of the theater’s power supply,” he said. “You wonder that this show is so expensive?”