No, that title is not obscene. It is a line of nonsense from The Lord of the Rings. It felt strangely appropriate as a title for this post which will hopefully dissect the brobdignagian failure of the musical of the same name.
Now, anyone who lives in Toronto or follows the theatre is well aware of the show’s production, and it’s arguably untimely end. I wrote a review for the show a couple months back and it appears that (for a change) I actually tapped into popular sentiment somewhat. I didn’t predict, as others did, that the show would fold in six months, which turned out to be true. What I did say is that the show is by and large a glorious attempt at greatness, but a failed one. To borrow from a review for a movie which has a similar feel to it; Greatness and miscalculation fight for [[stage]] space. The show comes across as a series of grandiose setpieces and storylines punctuated by underwhelming songs; and at the same felt like a show with a bunch of rousing song-and-dance numbers with an interminable plot and narrative. Here and elsewhere the “critics” and I agree on why the show failed to find an audience.
Where we diverge is in the underlying nature of the show, and why the show failed as a story. I can’t help but notice that everyone is piling on to “the show was an attempt at a cash-in” bandwagon. Occam’s razor dictates that this theory is patently false; if the show was just about making money off the popularity of the films then surely the epic sword and sorcery character of the films would have been translated to the stage. Instead, the show went the opposite route; and tried to combine the more significant strands of the text itself; the pastoral innocence of new experience and travels, the epic glory of people rising up from simple beginnings to achieve great things in a large world, and the incredible sense of epic history littered throughout the text.
The show failed precisely because it miscalculated in this effort. While those are all critical elements of the story, they only function when taken together. Wallace and company instead basically ran the show as a series of interludes; the narrative would break for a song to capture the pastoral innocence of the hobbits for example; yet without being properly incorporated into the larger narrative these breaks and changes don’t create the “big picture” that Tolkien created, but rather a comic book presented in three dimensions; with underwhelming actors belting out prosaic-titlecards instead of thrilling prose and poetry.
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