Rings gets a fix, but is it enough?
ELIZABETH RENZETTI
Globe and Mail Update
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May 9, 2007 at 4:02 AM EDT
LONDON Saruman, that grizzled old necromancer, is caught in a spotlight,
sounding a battle
cry to his army of orcs: I have trained you and equipped you! I know your
hearts beat with a
single purpose! The orcs scuttle purposefully as the martial score swells and
Saruman
brandishes his staff (very old-school, price unknown) while rising up, borne
aloft on a nifty
piece of stage technology (very new-school, price at least $1-million).
The music fades, Saruman (also known as Brian Protheroe) thunks down to stage
level, and the
assistant choreographer comes out to have a word with her orcs. In an instant,
their body
language changes from rampaging chimpanzee to off-duty actor: shoulders
slumped, legs splayed,
chins on spears. The stage they're on, at the historic Theatre Royal Drury
Lane, is framed by
creeping branches that reach out into the auditorium, partly obscuring a couple
of the boxes.
The set for The Lord of the Rings boasts more foliage now than when the musical
opened in
Toronto 13 months ago, which is interesting, because the rest of the show has
been
weed-whacked: gone are the long speeches, some minor characters and one
intermission. It has
been trimmed, crucially, to three hours, a length designed to test neither
patience nor
posteriors.
That running time is vitally important to Lord of the Rings producer Kevin
Wallace, who has
tried to learn from the hard lessons of the show's less-than-successful Toronto
run, which
ended after a disappointingly short five months at the Princess of Wales
Theatre.
One of the lessons we learned is that we're bound by the rules of theatre,
Wallace says, and
one of the guiding rules of commercial theatre today is that you need to be of
an average
length.
Six more minutes were recently trimmed from the show, he says, so that the
first preview
Wednesday night won't run longer than three hours. (The original Toronto
production was
supposed to be contained at that length as well.) Wallace says he solicited
various opinions
after the show opened in Toronto, and the three primary messages were: more
music, make it
three hours and have a bigger emotional impact in Act 3. Soon after the
reviews landed,
director/writer Matthew Warchus and his collaborator, Shaun McKenna, returned
to London to work
on the story, and Indian composer A.R. Rahman created new songs to provide an
emotional drive
to the musical's second half. The result, Wallace says, is less of the
cerebral version that
launched in Toronto, and more a traditional piece of commercial musical theatre.
Wallace looks exhausted, which is not surprising, considering that his days are
long and filled
with marketing plans, technical hurdles and giant, stilt-walking trees, and his
nights are
probably filled with some anxiety over the prospect that this thing might never
fly.
His assistant brings him a coffee beverage with an extra shot of espresso. His
answers,
detailed and complex, are often cleft with lengthy pauses. He used to be an
actor, before going
to work for Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group, and his soft voice
carries.
The Lord of the Rings musical opened in Toronto last year with Canadian
producing partners
David and Ed Mirvish and Michael Cohl, and a $3-million loan from the Ontario
government. It
was billed as the biggest and most ambitious theatrical production ever
staged, but for many
critics the ambition was unfulfilled (very expensive, largely
incomprehensible, wrote Ben
Brantley of The New York Times).
Wallace did not part on the best of terms with his Toronto partners (who still
own a
20-per-cent stake in the London show). An employee associated with the Toronto
production team
details how acrimonious relations became between the two camps, adding, We
were sold on a show
that was simply never delivered.
Alisa Palmer, a Canadian theatre veteran, was resident director on the Toronto
production, an
experience she describes as positive, but not happy. Palmer says the British
team had the
best intentions for the musical, and they had such exceptional ideas
I still
think it can be
a great production. I hope it will be.
However, Palmer says communication broke down between the British creative team
and the
Canadian actors, producers and technical staff. There was such animosity at
the end. The
Canadians ended up feeling like Tolkien's undersized heroes ignored and
patronized.
It's not uncommon, Palmer says, for the metaphors of the play to influence the
production:
Here, you have this story an innocent hobbit who confronts the shadow and
comes out having to
pay the price, but the sacrifice provides wellness and success for the rest of
the world. I
sometimes think of the Canadians as the hobbits and the shadow got the better
of some of the
hobbits.
Wallace is at pains not to reopen old wounds, but clearly they're not
completely healed. He
returns more than once to the now-infamous press conference, held the day the
show's closing
was announced, in which he, probably inadvertently, scored a hat trick against
Canadian pride
by singling out local critics, referring to London as The Lord of the Rings'
spiritual home and
talking about how the show's restrained English sensibility did not suit its
Toronto context.
Even now, Wallace is eager to explain that last point, which he swears was not
intended as a
pejorative. He chooses his words carefully and slowly. I get frustrated with
people who think
this is a judgment, because it isn't, he says. Somewhere in the sensibility
of the tone, the
Britishness of the production in Toronto, it had a non-musical theatre subtlety
to it which was
not easy on the audience in terms of sitting there for 3 hours.
It's not a
judgment on either
Toronto audiences or Toronto actors. It's simply a fact.
One of the Canadian actors from the Toronto production, Michael Therriault, has
come to London
to reprise his role as Gollum. He'll have reason to hiss, Precious, precious:
The show cost
about $28-million to mount in Canada and will cost almost that much again in
London, making it
one of the most expensive productions in the history of the West End, Wallace
says.
Some critics think the length of the show and the choice of city doomed the
original
enterprise. Toronto kicked a lot of money into the production, which is why
they did it there,
but the market wasn't big enough, says Mark Shenton, theatre critic for the
Express on Sunday,
who also writes a theatre column for the British trade newspaper The Stage.
Shenton liked the
Toronto production his review called it a phenomenal visual and aural feast
but he says
it's too early to know how well the show will do in its new incarnation on the
West End.
There's a big question mark around it although it does stand a better chance
in London than
in Toronto.
But he says, Filling an auditorium that's more than 2,000 seats, you have to
reach out to a
bigger demographic than teenaged boys, the way [the hit musical] Wicked needed
to reach out to
more than teenage girls. But there's no magic formula. If there were, we'd all
be Cameron
Mackintosh.
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