Elf benefits: on stage in Toronto. Photo: Manuel Harlan/EPO
For those of us with an eye for fantasy, The Lord of the Rings is a real page-turner. The last time I read it - during a sleepless 36-hour marathon undertaken as an antidote to the publicity surrounding the first of the recent films - the pages I turned most quickly of all were the ones devoted to the many songs, rhymes and other needless verses in a book whose poetry is to be found more in its occasionally sublime imagery and its beautiful maps - oh! those maps - than in its beastly balladeering.
My immediate reaction, then, on learning that a musical version of the great work is opening this week at the 2000-seat Princess of Wales theatre in Toronto, was to wish the production a pleasant stay on the other side of the Atlantic. Needlessly churlish? According to the first press reports, following a run of previews, apparently so. Having feared endless appearances from the relentless Tom Bombadil, it seems the trilogy's most supercharged songster has been struck off the register - a good start indeed.
As it turns out, the stage bonanza is less of a musical-lover's musical (or a musical-hater's one, for that matter) than a kind of modern-day gesamtkunstwerk, with great emphasis on theatrical spectacle (Sauron ex machina) and enough variety among the musical accompaniments to make the three-and-a-half hours pass by speedily enough. Most importantly, there are very few songs, and the chorus of wailing elves is employed to offer a commentary - à la greque - during the battle scenes. According to producer Kevin Wallace, "It's a hybrid: it's not a musical, it's not a play, it's not a spectacle, it's a stage adaptation."
Nor is the production to be considered a spin-off from the Jackson three. Some four years in the making, the only idea Wallace and director Matthew Warchus seems to have taken from the New Zealander's Oscar factory is the supersize budget - the production costs amount to some $25m (£14m), making it the most expensive theatre production of all time.
More importantly, they've restored the dystopian line - bewilderingly axed from Jackson's version - that Tolkien pursued on bringing his heroic halflings back to their once-peaceful homeland. This element of the story, used by Tolkien to illustrate the fact that there's more to life than free will and roses under the dawning Age of Men, is one of the many features of the book that remind us of fantasy's genuine relevance and value.
So with the show about to go on, and plans already afoot for a West-End transfer sometime next year, there will be many eager to see if the strolling players' offering will be more one-true-ring than ding-a-ling bling.
Lord of the Rings opens at the Princess of Wales theatre in Toronto this Friday.
