The end of the musical behemoth? The Lord of the Rings at Drury Lane. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
With The Lord of the Rings set to close early at Drury Lane in July, it will enter the record books as not just one of the West End's most lavish productions but also one of its costliest failures. That follows the show's early closure in Toronto, where it had set an interesting precedent for theatrical investment. The Ontario government put forward some $2.5m towards its reported budget of $23m, on behalf of their 12 million citizens. (The chief executive of the Ontario Tourism Marketing Partnership Corporation, Sandra McInnis, said at the time: "We've never done anything like this. But this is one of the largest productions ever to come to Toronto, and we have a vested interested in seeing it's successful.")
Producer Kevin Wallace is undaunted by the show's double public failure. He is simply keeping the ball rolling, and is now looking to take the production to Germany in November 2009, with the Antipodes and the far east to follow. And as long as that ball is rolling, the investments made so far aren't totally written off: they'll be aggregated with the new investment being sought and may, in theory, one day pay back.
However, this could spell the end of the age of the musical behemoth. Theatre audiences can be equally content with the more modest virtues of good stories that are well told. Just around the corner from Drury Lane is one of the West End's most instructive examples: The Woman in Black, now in its 20th year. The show was first produced at Scarborough's Stephen Joseph Theatre. Director Robin Hereford, who commissioned its adaptation when he was acting artistic director there, said at the time: "I only had a very small amount of money left in my production budget and enough wages to pay only four actors."
Making a virtue of necessity, adaptor Stephen Mallatratt delivered a script that only called for half that number of actors, and turned what Hereford himself called a "cut-price stocking filler" into a hit. Now, Hereford says: "On reflection it is the very economy of the production which is the chief reason for its continued success. Had I access to a more generous budget, we could have been in grave danger of losing the essential simplicity and innate theatricality with which we currently tell our story."
The small size of the cast not only keeps the budget down, it also usefully forces the audience to use their imagination more, and become complicit in the act of storytelling. Director John Doyle long ago adopted a method of employing actor-musicians as an act of economic necessity to produce musicals in cash-strapped British regional theatres like Newbury's Watermill. Doyle has also turned it into an artistic choice that has propelled the Newbury production of Sweeney Todd, for instance, all the way back to Broadway.
That's also why big shows often reveal themselves, paradoxically, to be so much better in smaller spaces. The 1998 Broadway musical Parade came up as a gleamingly dramatic and momentously scored musical drama in the more intimate confines of the Donmar Warehouse last year. Ditto the ongoing success of the Menier Chocolate Factory's radical reinvestigations of shows like Sunday in the Park with George and La Cage aux Folles, which was originally produced at the London Palladium back in 1986.
I recently interviewed the Donmar's Michael Grandage, who admitted to me that his production of Frost/Nixon, which went on to the West End's Gielgud and then Broadway, was never better in his opinion than when it was seen in the close-up intimacy of the Donmar. Transfers may have brought it to a much wider audience, but it inevitably lost something in the process.
