Bored of the Rings Before UK??? Date: 24 March 2006
Money can’t always buy you a good show – and it certainly can’t buy you good reviews. The creative team behind the big-budget stage musical adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings - which opened last night in Toronto and is expected to open at the West End’s Dominion Theatre in March 2007 - may be disappointed by the decidedly underwhelming critical reception today. Ben Brantley in the New York Times was particularly unimpressed: “Everyone and everything winds up lost in this $25 million adaptation of JRR Tolkien's cult-inspiring trilogy of fantasy novels. That includes plot, character and the patience of most ordinary theatregoers…. The show's mantra could be, ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’." He added the show felt less like a musical and more like “a seriously long (more than three-and-a-half hours) drill team competition for high schools devoted to the nurturing of geeks, goths and hippies manqué who are really annoyed that they were born too late for Woodstock”. The Toronto Star’s Richard Ouzounian was also disappointed: “Because we never get a sense of who anyone really is and what they truly believe in, sentiments that are meant to sound lofty somehow wind up on the far side of cheesy… And a climactic moment such as Gollum's final struggle with Frodo for the ring is so poorly staged and lit that I defy anyone who doesn't already know the plot to guess what is happening.” He summarised: “It's like giving a child an elaborate electronic toy, when all he really wanted was for you to tell him a good bedtime story.” Meanwhile, British theatre critic, the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer, was equally bored of the rings, writing: “there is nothing here to rival the imaginative visual coups and heart-tugging emotion of such great family shows as Billy Elliot, The Lion King and Mary Poppins”. According to Spencer, the book and lyrics, by Warchus and Shaun McKenna, are bland and “desperately short of both humour and depth of feeling.” He added: “Peter Darling's folksy choreography isn't a patch on his dazzling work on Billy Elliot, and one lives in constant dread of a nasty outbreak of Morris dancing.” Only The Times’s Sam Marlowe gave the show four stars and saw glimmers of “theatrical magic”, which, she said, “wins out over the weaknesses… it’s best moments are, like the ring, an intoxicating enchantment.” The New York Post’s Michael Reidel surmised: “While the official line is that The Lord of the Rings is still going to be staged in London next year, sources say the producers and creators are bracing themselves for what could be a complete wipeout in Toronto - and the end of the line for the show.”
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