Slimmed-down Lord of the Rings Returns to London???

Further to our item earlier this week about French and Saunders – Still Alive providing a possible autumn filler at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane (See The Goss, 22 Apr 2008), The Lord of the Rings producer Kevin Wallace has contacted Whatsonstage.com to clarify some points about the Tolkien musical’s closing date.

“I just wanted to make it clear that The Lord of the Rings is vacating the Theatre Royal on 19 July because that is the date that (theatre owners) Really Useful Theatres insist they need us to stop playing in order to have the theatre ready after our three week get-out and the eight-week reinstatement (paid for by Wallace) RUT has calculated is required to get the theatre ready for the French & Saunders season.

“We would not, out of choice, stop playing on the Saturday before one of the busiest periods in the theatre calendar commences on Monday 21 July, when British families are flexible due to the start of the summer holidays, and foreign tourists are filling London. UK families and foreign tourists are two of our main audience demographics.”

The Lord of the Rings will have played to more than 700,000 by the time it closes in July, and Wallace is confident the show would have had a strong finish through to the end of the summer, especially as he had lined up a big-name US star to take over the role of wizard Gandalf. In an interview with this week’s Time Out, he predicted that the cast announcement would have resulted in a 20 percent spike in audiences. “But it was not to be,” he told the magazine. “Our agenda and that of our landlord were not the same.”

However, Wallace remains optimistic about future outings in Germany (on the same epic scale as at Drury Lane) and Australasia (where the high-tech set will be scaled down substantially to make for simplified touring) – as well as a return to “home turf”. He said: “Our ambition is to bring the more flexible version back to the UK and ultimately into the West End. The show will survive and it will be back in London.”