The Lord of the Rings

Peter Howe & James Loye in The Lord of the Rings

“The third age of Middle Earth is over”, a voice-over narrator solemnly intones at the end of the stage version of The Lord of the Rings, originally premiered in Toronto last year and now re-opened at London’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in a newly revised, clarified and somewhat shorter version. It may also mark the end of the age of gigantism in the theatre: shows don’t get much bigger, bolder or more ambitious than this, so why try to top it? But why, too, try to do it in the first place—surely attempting to distil some 1,200 pages of an adventure fantasy novel and hoping to re-make it as one fantastic piece of music theatre was always going to be a tall order? Does aiming so high mean that it has further to fall?

There’s certainly been nothing quite like it before. I saw it at its Toronto premiere last year, and was impressed then by its amazing stagecraft as well as its epic sweep, even if its overall tone wasn’t always easy to pin down. The creators at the time denied they were producing a musical, but instead were aiming for a theatricalisation of the story that used some of the conventions of a musical.

It’s true that there are still some problems with the structure. An inevitable surfeit of exposition, especially in the first act, is difficult to keep up with, and the removal of the second interval (replaced by a weird pause in which the auditorium is invaded instead by an army of Orcs) leads now to a jarring transition into the third act, but the show is more of a piece now. With the luxury arrival of solid musical theatre talents like Laura Michelle Kelly as Galadriel—whose glittering entrance by elevated harness could, admittedly, come straight out of a Sarah Brightman concert—and Jerome Pradon as Strider, it both feels and plays more like a conventional musical than before.

With a score by Indian composer A.R. Rahman and Finnish New Age pop group Varttina that delivers a frequently surprising and refreshing combination of folk melody, belting ballads and filmic underscoring, cleverly stitched together by Christopher Nightingale to seamless effect, there’s delight as well as danger here, in a search to do for J.R.R. Tolkien what Les Miserables did for Victor Hugo.

Laura Michelle Kelly and cast in The Lord of the Rings

As with Les Miserables, director Matthew Warchus and his brilliant designer Rob Howell keep the narrative turning and churning with a magnificent and often startling series of stage pictures. Their sense of control of the story (co-authored by Warchus with Shaun McKenna) and their creation of a wholly inhabited alternative universe is thrilling. As its massive pageant of character and confrontation between good and evil evolves across the three-and-a-quarter hour evening—down from nearly four in Toronto, though an extra interval there means that they’ve probably only shaved about 30 minutes from it overall—it is still long, but never dull.

As I found in Toronto, there is, of course, an awful lot of plot to get in. The programme provides a detailed two-page synopsis, but even with its help you may find yourself floundering for the precise meaning of particular events from time to time. Then again, many felt the same about the Oscar-winning film trilogy, too. Even if the detail may be sometimes murky for non-Tolkienites, the general shape and sweep is clear, as hobbit Frodo Baggins sets out on a quest to return a gold ring with dark powers to the place where it was forged and destroy it there, before it is reclaimed by the forces of Sauron who could use it to control the fate of Middle Earth.