Horrible horrible first review:
Why we’re left bored of the Rings
Mar. 23, 2006. 11:16 PM
RICHARD OUZOUNIAN
THEATRE CRITIC
There’s a moment late in the first act of The Lord of the Rings, when it looks as though all the hopes and dreams Toronto had pinned on this show were going to come true.
The members of the Fellowship have finally come together and set out on their quest for the ring. As a stirring choral anthem swells behind them, designer Rob Howell’s triple-turntable set starts revolving and its 17 elevators begin to lift the cast into the air.
It’s a stirring sequence, the kind that gives you goosebumps and makes you think, “That’s it, they’ve got it!” All too sadly, that feeling never happens again and when the 361/27-hour, $28 million behemoth finally comes to an end, you may find yourself fighting back tears, but they’ll be ones of disappointment.
From the morning last March when this city first heard that a stage version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic trilogy would be having its world premiere here, some people hoped it would be magnificent, others feared it might be foolish.
But no one ever thought it would wind up being dull. Yet somehow that’s the most fitting word to describe what director Matthew Warchus and his colleagues have laboured so long and hard to do.
They offer non-stop music to engage our ears, endless visuals to hold our eyes prisoner and special effects to raise our pulse.
But except in fleeting moments, they haven’t given us anyone or anything to care about. Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Gollum - they’re all there, but they rattle around the cavernous stage like jelly beans in an oil drum. They’re not people, they’re pawns in a giant rapid-fire chess game that nobody winds up winning.
The problems with this version of The Lord of the Rings are so basic that you wonder how those involved with it could watch it coming together and still not see what was wrong.
To begin with, it looks like no one ever decided what kind of show it was meant to be. “It’s not a musical,” the creators kept insisting, but Warchus gives us enough trappings of the form to make us think that it is.
There’s a saccharine ballad between Arwen and Aragorn that’s repeated endlessly, a lengthy dance number at the Prancing Pony Inn which stops the action dead in every sense of the word and a meandering new-age anthem for Galadriel to warble while dressed in disco finery.
But when push comes to shove and the big emotional moments arrive, no one ever actually gets to sing. The music swells behind the cast and they often have to shout to be heard over it, but it doesn’t help them soar.
It took the combined forces of Värttinä, A.R. RahmanÖ and Christopher Nightingale to write the score, but no matter how energetically Rick FoxÖ conducts his orchestra, it all starts to sound the same.
The script by Shaun McKenna and Warchus is also problematic. In its desire to compress three books into one evening, it sacrifices any kind of depth in the name of forward motion. And 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.
Howell’s design has its spectacular moments, but the much-heralded turntable soon wears out its welcome. And ultimately most of the special effects are things we have all seen done before, and better, in The Lion King or at Cirque du Soleil.
Paul Pyant’s lighting is dramatically striking, but it usually fails to illuminate the actors’ faces and it’s often difficult to tell who’s speaking at any given time.
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.
With so much to work against, the cast are more to be pitied than censured. A few of them make vivid impressions, most notably Michael Therriault’s twisted Gollum, ÖPeter Howe’s sweet Sam and ÖEvan Buliung’s sturdy Aragorn.
The rest either get lost, such as ÖJames Loye’s underpowered Frodo, or make a mess of things, such as Brent Carver’s overly mannered Gandalf.
Interestingly enough, at the critics’ preview I attended, the audience only broke into spontaneous applause twice and that was at the conclusion of two of Gollum’s scenes: intense, intimate moments that were free from any spectacle.
Because, for all the creators’ talk about wanting to emphasize the human element in Tolkien’s story, that’s what’s almost totally missing from the version they’ve presented us.
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.
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