Eighteen years ago, I journeyed to Toronto to review a massive theatrical adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” With a $24 million budget in 2006, the show was one of the most expensive productions ever created. Balrog put King Kong to shame. The Ents made the Knights Who Say “Ni!” look like toy soldiers. The cast was bigger than a small Canadian town
Bring diminutive of stature, I remember walking into a short man’s clothing store in downtown Toronto before the show and asking the owner how his business was doing. “Great,” he replied. “All of the hobbits have been coming in.”
He was about the only person happy. The ubertext of the Hollywood fantasy quest narrative was a costly flop in Toronto and later in London — despite the bonafides of the writers, Shaun McKenna and Matthew Warchus, and the Indian/Finnish/Anglo-American composing team of A.R. Rahman, Värttinä and Christopher Nightingale. The general consensus was that Peter Jackson had gotten there first with his movies. And thus Middle-earth was put aside when it came to big-scale theater.
But in 2023, the British director Paul Hart dusted off the show, chopped off at least half an hour, put musicians on the stage, John Doyle-style, and staged the whole thing in London’s 220-seat Watermill Theatre. He enjoyed much acclaim, not least because he dared to cram the Shire-saving adventures of Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf, Frodo and the gang into so small a space. Orc attacks and everything.
Frankly, I thought that take was what Chicago Shakespeare Theater was producing this summer on Navy Pier. And, in the best moments of the new U.S. staging of Hart’s production, which opened this weekend in The Yard on Navy Pier, you can see his real achievement with this show, especially if you also saw the Toronto original. Among other pleasures, there’s an immensely talented cast of actor-musicians, a rich sense of theatricality, a warm pre-show interchange with the audience and, in the form of Tony Bozzuto, a killer Gollum (he of the “horrible swallowing noise in his throat”) whose body and vocals are each as creepy as the other. And Frodo (Spencer Davis Mulford) and Sam (Michael Kurowski) are empathetic and charming.
But The Yard theater is four times the size of the Watermill and this production, designed by Simon Kenny and Rory Beaton, clearly fell to the temptation to employ a lot of technical effects that distract from what surely was Hart’s original, simple conceit. I’m not sure if the idea was to create something that might transfer to Broadway (the show already is moving to Auckland, New Zealand) but the future of this piece surely is in a fresh theatrical simplicity. What’s on offer will be fun for families, but simple it is not.
We don’t need a creaky lift to hoist Galadriel (the very fine Lauren Zakrin) a few feet in the air, nor a high porthole that makes her look more the arm-raising star of “Titanique” than one of Middle-earth’s most impressive elves. The digital intrusions are precisely that. This “Lord of the Rings,” not without its pleasures for superfans, is at its best when it celebrates its theatrical identity, not when it looks like a Cirque du Soleil spectacle or some kind of immersive “LOTR experience,” heaven forfend. That was already tried with this title and it didn’t work.
It would have been far better to focus more on the warmth of this Chicago cast and keep the scale, er, human. That would have reminded us all that young kids for more than 80 years read this book under their bedclothes. You do feel that more in Act 2, when the show stops frantically racing through all the plot (of which there is a lot) and takes a breath and focuses on what really matters in the theater, which is the relationships — between Frodo and Gandalf (Tom Amandes), nervous Frodo and his loving Uncle Bilbo (Rick Hall) and, of course, Frodo and Sam. And Hart made an effort to bring this show out into the audience. But there are swaths of this show that just inure.
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In fairness, this is inestimably challenging material (the novel had 500,000 words) and I don’t know how much freedom Hart had to mess with the original book and score, which includes copious amounts of underscoring. (I suspect, not much). At the show I saw, frankly, the musical underline made a lot of the spoken dialog hard to understand as the sound balance throughout was less than ideal, including in the musical numbers where the very decent singers often struggled to be heard above the musicians.
Part of the problem here is the rhythm of the original material, which tends to rush through one battle after another to a climax (and then a blackout). These have a numbing effect given that we know the plucky Hobbits are not going down that easy and it’s really only after Gollum shows up that actual tension is injected and some fluidity of movement is achieved.
I might be overly influenced here by having so admired “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” (which figured out that “Cats” does have to look like cats). But why do Hobbits have to look so, well, Hobbit-y and does Gandalf and the other elders really have to sport gray wigs and long, flowing robes? They don’t pop as they once did.
These characters are, after all, figments of one of the greatest imaginations ever to live. They could be whatever is in a creative person’s head.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Lord of the Rings — A Musical Tale” (3 stars)
When: Through Sept. 1
Where: The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier
Running time: 3 hours
Tickets: $52-$113 at 312-595-5600 and www.chicagoshakes.com
