Did Critics Get Precious about The Lord of the Rings?

Michael Therriault in The Lord of the Rings

Director Matthew Warchus' ambitious stage version of The Lord of the Rings has crossed the Atlantic from Toronto, where it premiered last year. It ran for just 230 performances there, but has now come to London's Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in a heavily reworked version. The show's combination of drama, circus, distinctly atypical musical score and elaborate effects conspire to form what is said to be perhaps the most expensive and lavish production ever seen in the West End. Did critics welcome it here?

Here’s a sampling of what they had to say:

Mark Shenton in his Theatre.com Review: "'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...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...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...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...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.”

Sam Marlowe of The London Times: "When I saw Matthew Warchus’s production in Toronto last year, I was dazzled and delighted by its ingenuity and visual invention. I was also frustrated by its slower, muddier passages, unimpressed by some key performances and deeply disappointed by its bungled climax. Happily, almost everything that was wrong has been put right. Some will prefer the slick grandiosity of Peter Jackson’s films; others will sneer at the very idea of singing hobbits. It’s their loss. Warchus and his team have a created a brave, stirring, epic piece of popular theatre that, without slavishly adhering to J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels, embraces their spirit. The show has charm, wit, and jaw-dropping theatrical brio; crucially, it also has real emotional heft. Warchus’s and Shaun McKenna’s book has been streamlined, but at more than three hours the show is still long—yet it doesn’t outstay its welcome. Rob Howell’s stunning tree-roots design stretches out into the auditorium, and performers, too, spill from the stage, creating a fantastical environment that draws you in and grips you from beginning to end… Go with an open mind, an open heart, and wide-open eyes, and prepare for enchantment.”

James Loye in The Lord of the Rings

Michael Billington of The Guardian: “I suppose there are two ways to approach this mega-musical: either as a paid-up Tolkien aficionado or as a wide-eyed newcomer. Having dipped only briefly into the original trilogy and the Peter Jackson movies, I entered Drury Lane as innocent as any hairy-toed hobbit. I emerged three and a quarter hours later sceptical as to the main matter but hugely impressed by the manner of Matthew Warchus's production. Obviously Shaun McKenna and Warchus, as co-authors, faced a huge task in boiling down a 1,000-page fantasy into a theatrical narrative. But, although bits of the backstory remain obscure, the main thrust is clear…Did the show convert me to Tolkien's world? Absolutely not. You won't find me sporting t-shirts, like some hippy-dippy American students, proclaiming ‘Gandalf for President.’ And I shall be quite happy to avoid, in future, the manufactured myth of Middle Earth. But I had a perfectly good time at Drury Lane and, if Tolkien's trilogy is to be a stage spectacle, I don't see how it could be better done.”

Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph: “The first chapter was written in Toronto in the spring of 2006, where this £12.5 million leviathan of a musical had its first theatrical outing... And now, in a shorter though not noticeably more lucid version, it opened last night at Drury Lane. I'm sorry to report that it remains a thumping great flop. I took my 14-year-old son along, who enjoyed Peter Jackson's epic Lord of the Rings films and is, I would guess, exactly the age and sex this show needs to attract in order to survive. Unfortunately he hated it even more than I did, sitting with his head in his hands in those moments when he wasn't tittering at the ponderous inanities of the script and the triteness of the lyrics…Repeatedly during this show you feel its creators have more money than either sense or imagination…Its run, I fear, will be nasty, brutish and short.”

Paul Taylor of The Independent: “The promised ‘hybrid of text, physical theatre, music and spectacle never previously seen on this scale’ turns out to be a show with a bit of an identity crisis, strong on dynamic spectacle, squeezed as drama, and in two minds about how it wants to use music dramatically. Especially when Laura Michelle Kelly's Galadriel lets rip with eerie crystalline clarity and Celtic-tinged melodic curlicues, [the music] can create a magical, otherworldly atmosphere that combines ethnic strangeness with elegiac lament for the passing of an era...Is impressive spectacle sufficient compensation for other inadequacies? When Gandalf is attacked by the demon, Balrog, an almighty wind gusts through the theatre. Viewed as a piece of music drama, this show is unlikely to blow you away.”