A musical that hits a bum note: Laura Michelle Kelly (centre) as Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
After sitting through last night's UK stage premiere of The Lord of the Rings, I'm now prepared to eat my words as regards an assertion I made only earlier that same day. "There are no bad ideas for musicals, just ideas gone awry or poorly executed," I confidently told a BBC interviewer when questioned on the topic at lunchtime. Within hours, I had changed my mind: there are bad ideas for musicals - and The Lord of the Rings is definitely one of them.
I fully understand the thinking behind my original thesis. Most musicals do sound daft or at the very least unpromising, if you simply describe them in outline. Who would have thought it made sense to fashion a stage extravaganza out of some slight, sweet children's poems by TS Eliot? The result, Cats, entered record books on both sides of the Atlantic. So, of course, has Les Misérables, a stage musical derived from a literary source that is only marginally less weighty than The Lord of the Rings. I defy anyone who sits through the Victor Hugo-inspired long-runner to offer a blow-by-blow account of the plot any better than they can of the Middle Earth adventure over at Drury Lane. It's no accident that both shows come with full synopses in the programme, rather as if we were at the opera.
Perhaps that's where The Lord of the Rings should have ended up - in the opera house, albeit at the obvious expense of the ongoing commercial life you only get from musicals. But if ever a work seemed straitjacketed into a form that is a far from natural fit, it's Tolkien's dense narrative, whose nomenclature alone requires considerable unpacking. No wonder Peter Jackson took three movies to accomplish the same task.
Its cinematic associations are actually too imprinted on the mind - not to mention too recent - to give the theatre version's creators much room to manoeuvre. That's yet again where Stephen Sondheim has forged ahead with brilliance, placing singular subject matter at the top of an aesthetic output that simply resists comparison to work in other forms, even when a particular show - A Little Night Music, say - is in fact based on something extant (in that case, an utterly contrasting Bergman film).
Today's largely adverse critical reaction to The Lord of the Rings doesn't bode well for next spring's big West End entry, a stage musical of Gone with the Wind that will in fact be the second such show in London history. As with the Tolkien, isn't Margaret Mitchell's incident-packed novel allied forever with the Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh film from 1939? Pity the cast that has to match those forebears, or the director required to raze Atlanta to the ground all over again. Some theatrical ideas, I now concede, aren't great, and merely to announce a project doesn't mean you have to deliver on it. In the absolute best interests of everyone involved, is it too late to suggest that Gone with the Wind vanish to the wind?
.png?w=600)
