Again I must apologize for not posting for so long. In part it’s because I’ve been traveling and was away from the internet for several days. Right now I’m in London, and naturally I took the opportunity to see the Lord of the Rings musical, playing at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Not that I was terribly keen on seeing it. I’ve read several reviews, and with few exceptions they’re pretty dismissive. Still, I felt I should keep up on such things.

Peter Howe as Sam, James Loye as Frodo, and Michael Therriault as Gollum

As I have for decades now, I visited the half-price ticket booth on Leicester Square, now known simply as Tkts. Between the low exchange rate for the dollar and the incredibly high costs of just about everything in London, the sticker shock was considerable. I got a fairly decent stalls seat for ₤32.50, including the ₤2.50 fee charged by Tkts. This was for a Friday night, and there were some empty seats for the performance, so anyone coming to London would probably be able to get tickets at the last minute.

The musical is not part of the Rings film franchise. It wasn’t licensed through New Line Cinema but through Saul Zaentz, who is credited alongside Kevin Wallace as the producer. (He was one of the film’s executive producers, having sold the production and distribution rights to New Line.) Technically the musical has a book-based license, and Zaentz controls the many trademarks and adaptation rights associated with the book.

It’s hard to believe, though, that a splashy musical of this sort would have been created had the film not been such a huge success. (It debuted in Toronto in early 2006, having been announced in 2002.) The play also adopts some of the same narrative changes that the film had. Arwen appears to Aragorn as a vision at a couple of points during the quest, and Merry and Pippin are, inevitably, used as broad comic relief.

Running about three hours—including a twenty-minute intermission—the musical largely comes across as a hurried series of references to scenes and characters from the book. Rohan, including Théoden, Éowyn, and Éomir, is cut altogether, and there’s no mention of Gondor or Minas Tirith. Denethor cumbersomely becomes “The Steward of the Lands of Men” and appears only briefly. The Ents, impressively played by actors on hugely tall stilts, show up long enough to declare that they take immense amounts of time to say or decide anything—and then make an instant decision to attack Saruman, something they are barely seen doing.

The characters and plot are so sketchy that the thing has to try and get by on spectacle, which quickly becomes tiresome. Yes, the set is impressive, with its huge tangle of branches surrounding the stage and creeping out over the boxes in the auditorium. The complex of elevators that make up the revolving stage keep moving up and down in various combinations, allowing the characters to swarm up, down, and around without giving much of any sense as to where they are. It is so elaborate that at one point when Galadriel walks along the outer ring singing, the actress obviously has to pay close attention to when each platform sinks to a level where she can step onto it, pausing at times to wait for it and hence distracting from the action. I was more concerned as to whether she would trip than to what the lyrics were.

I can’t imagine anyone who has not read the book and/or seen the film several times understanding what is going on much of the time. Indeed, despite having done both, occasionally I was confused. The hooded Rangers who appear slinking about the stage as the Hobbits set out for Rivendell are supposedly protecting them but actually look a bit like Black Riders without horses. The fact that there are only three Black Riders onstage at any given moment doesn’t help matters. Later the battles of Helm’s Deep and Minas Tirith are sort of combined into one, but there is almost no clue as to where it is taking place. Somewhere in the “Lands of Men,” presumably.

Maybe there are lines of dialogue that explain some of this. There’s a lot of noise, though, and the microphones used to project the voices often make it difficult to tell who is speaking.

I found the hour-long first act pretty dull, with the action simply racing along with no time to absorb any of it. Constant hectic movement seemed to be the norm. “Strong” characters were made to stride energetically about the stage shouting their lines, no matter what the content of their speeches. Malcolm Storry as Gandalf, Andrew Jarvis as Elrond, and Steven Miller as Boromir particularly suffered from this tendency.

Oddly, Act Two picked up to some extent, at least in its early portions. It began spectacularly with Gollum climbing headfirst down the tangle of branches that formed the “curtain.” Michael Therriault, who originated the role in the Toronto production, was impressive throughout, making his rapid-fire switches between the “good” Sméagol and “bad” Gollum completely distinguishable. And unlike the film, the musical keeps Tolkien’s moment when Sam’s scolding of Gollum squelches the creature’s last chance for redemption.

There was a brief descent into the downright silly with the entrance to Lothlórien. Galadriel sings about her land as she and several Elves descend from the flies and bob about on what are essentially giant bungies. Did you know that Elves can fly? They do here (and in an earlier scene where “Elránien,” a female Elf substituted for Gildor, and her companions appear).

Laura Michelle Kelly, however, is one of the few real singers in the thing, and she has a genuine stage presence. Once she gets off her bungie, she makes a marvelous Galadriel. (Sévan Stephan as Gimli can sing as well, though he’s only given one brief number, the “Lament for Moria.”) There is no Mirror scene. Frodo does offer Galadriel the Ring, however, and Kelly convincingly manages the whole transformation of her character into a threatening, dark queen and back simply through facial expression, a movement forward, and dramatic changes in her voice.

Kelly is the biggest star the production has. She won an Olivier for playing Mary Poppins and has done other big musical roles in London. The temptation to put her into additional scenes was obviously too great for the producers to resist. She gets another aria as she appears as a sort of vision just before the Shelob episode. Fair enough, the book introduces her into that scene via the Phial, and the film has her appear to Frodo and encourage him. Still, the musical unwisely brings her back yet again for the scene of the Ring’s destruction, where she sings distractingly behind the marvelous effect of Gollum’s slow-motion tumble into the Cracks of Doom.

Frodo and Galadriel’s conversation is one of the few quiet moments in the play and all the more effective for it. The other calm, extended scene comes when Sam and Frodo sit talking and singing about the old tales and about how magic will go out of Middle-earth when the Elves leave. This is a touching passage, one of the best things in the entire evening—marred mainly by tedious lyrics like “the tales we tell will cast a spell.”

Indeed, I don’t understand why the producers thought this had to be a musical at all. Why not just a spectacular play? The songs are utterly unmemorable, and they obviously take up time that could have been spent on exposition and characterization. Tolkien provides moments when songs could come in naturally, like Frodo’s performance in the Prancing Pony. Instead, it is turned into a big production number, with all the patrons at the inn, along with Butterbur (sorry, I mean “Landlord of the Prancing Pony”) joining in the singing and dancing. The result is that Frodo does not put on the Ring accidentally when he executes an athletic dance move. There’s no apparent reason why he does put it on once the number ends.

Is it just that tourists coming to London now only want to see big musicals? The people I was standing in line with at the Tkts booth seemed mainly to be hoping for cheap seats for Chicago and Cabaret. I come to London about once a year, and every time there seem to be fewer straight plays and more musicals—many of the same ones still playing time after time. Perhaps the planners felt that Rings stood a chance of earning back the huge investment in stage technology, costumes, and an ensemble of seventy actors by making it a musical. Maybe it would not have seemed different enough from the film for people to want to see it.

I don’t want to suggest that the thing is a dead loss. Some of the characters come through fairly well. Peter Howe, who originally played Sam in Toronto, perhaps captures his character the most effectively. Terence Fritsch makes a very Hobbit-y Bilbo and ages convincingly. As I’ve mentioned, both Galadriel and Gollum are well done.

And to be sure, some of the visual effects are impressive. When Bilbo and Frodo put on the Ring, they do vanish quite convincingly. Shelob, a giant framework spider moved by visible puppeteers, is creepy and ominous. (The Balrog is another matter, being a bit like a giant black origami figure that unfolds for a moment and vanishes.) The Orcs, bounding around on little springy stilts, are full of energy and menace—though there are far too few of them to even begin to suggest the immense battles conveyed so well in the film. But overall the thing comes close to being pure spectacle, and that’s not the same as being epic, a quality that both the novel and film capture.

Like other Tolkien fans, I have little patience with those who dismiss Rings as a lightweight tale of Munchkin-like Hobbits and simplistic battles of good versus evil cribbed from the great national epics. The novel is clearly not any of that, and I don’t believe Peter Jackson’s film reduced it to that in the adaptation process, despite the necessary compression. Sitting through the musical last night, though, for the first time I understood what such naysayers apparently feel. Boiled down beyond its essence, with the characters for the most part mere references to Tolkien’s originals and the events reduced to fleeting sketches, it did seem pretty clichéd and silly.

All in all, it was not a long enough evening to encompass Tolkien’s tale, but it seemed pretty darned long nevertheless. If, however, you think that any version of Rings is better than no version at all, then by all means give it a whirl if you get a chance.