Quotes of the Day

Thus did Saruman unleash his cold fury on the Kingdom of Rohan, dispatching evil Orcs to swarm the mountain fortress of Helm's Deep. Under blood red clouds, Aragorn and men stood against the invading ape-hordes, who loped around on crutches they used like freakish weapons. The elf warrior Legolas mounted a promontory to fire arrows at the Orc targets: FFWWOOSH! FFWWOOSH!

On the stage of Toronto's Princess of Wales Theatre a few weeks ago, the new theatrical production of The Lord of the Rings was barreling through a rehearsal of its most complicated scene when the pounding music stopped, the smoke machines fizzled and the 40-ton moving stage whirred to a halt. "Joe," choreographer Peter Darling asks one of the Orc actors, "are you aware you didn't die on Arrow Two? Your crutches have to whack up in the air."

The three-year ordeal of putting J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy trilogy onstage involved more than getting each Orc to hit his mark--and to keep from falling into the first row of spectators, as one Orc-tor reportedly did during a preview performance. The show's creative team had a bunch of unique challenges. How to choreograph the great battles Tolkien described. How to visualize the dozen realms in the great saga, and the dozens of characters of many species. How to blend narrative, drama and music in a 3 1/2-hour production--the longest musical this side of Wagner and, at C$28.2 million, the most expensive show on or off Broadway--and do it all without retakes, location shooting or postproduction computer effects.

Most daunting for producer Kevin Wallace, playwright Shaun McKenna, director and co-writer Matthew Warchus, set and costume designer Rob Howell and musical director Christopher Nightingale was the task of satisfying all those Tolkienites whose image of Middle-earth has been shaped by many readings of the sacred text and latterly by Peter Jackson's Oscar-laden film versions.

Well, they're doing fine. The stage version of The Lord of the Rings, which officially opens this Thursday, is a robust, serious, quite faithful transposition of the saga. This is the one LOTR (to use the fans' acronym) you can consume in a single evening and say, with a pleased smile, "Yes. That's it." It captures much of the original work's grandeur, variety--and melancholy, for a vanished, perhaps imaginary age when great evil was met with greater good. For every omnipotent villain there is an even more stalwart, selfless hero. For every bitter betrayal, a boon companion; for every wound, a healing.

And for many of the saga's indelible images, there is an ingenious theatrical equivalent. The eerie strobe light reveals a Black Rider and its steed (a man and puppet on stilts), sending fearful hobbits scurrying. Dead men rise from the Marshes (rendered as a giant silver baggie) to make war against Sauron's legions. The Winnebago-size Shelob advances toward her prey with the help of six puppeteers. In the Mountains of Moria, Gandalf battles the enormous Balrog (an Erector-set confection with steaming orange eyes and a wingspan of close to 10 m) as the sound effects roar, a strong wind gusts from the stage and a blizzard of black confetti blankets the audience. As for Frodo, he not only lives, he sings.

And yet. A stage musical of LOTR? Good Lord, why? Well, for starters, because the original three-volume story was filled with music--more than 50 songs and poems that added levity and lyricism to the grand war ballad of its narrative. In 1967, Donald Swann, half of the comic-songwriting duo Flanders and Swann ("Madeira, m'dear"), released an album of musical settings to seven LOTR verses.

Another, more concrete reason to put LOTR on the stage: because it's such a formidable franchise. The books are among the most popular and beloved works in history. And although the first attempt at a Middle-earth movie, a 1978 animated version by Ralph Bakshi of the first half of the saga, flopped so resoundingly that the second half was never made, Peter Jackson did all right with his three installments, released in 2001-03. They are the all-time top-grossing movie trilogy (sorry, George Lucas), earning $2.9 billion at the worldwide box office.

Book, movie--fine. Yet you may still be thinking the idea of putting the story onstage is mad. If so, you aren't the first. "I thought it was foolish," says Warchus, 39. "It's such an earnest story, and people are so protective of it." Yet he signed on. He had built a tidy international reputation on a controversial Hamlet (with Simon Russell Beale) and with the stagings in several countries of Yasmina Reza's three-hander Art. He was a comer who hadn't yet arrived. He needed a huge challenge--the Nicholas Nickleby or Les Misérables that lifted director Trevor Nunn into the theatrical stratosphere. When he says the new endeavor is "a big, very visible, very expensive experiment," he sounds both wary and proud.

Saul Zaentz, 85, who produced the Bakshi film and owns the movie and performance rights to LOTR, approved the choice of Warchus because he was "young, active and still trying to make it to the next level." Zaentz also liked Howell, 39, who had the cybersavvy to bring new technology to this old story. "He's like a little kid with all the right tools," Zaentz says. "And it really is exciting when you see the things he's done."

Warchus has worked for 2 1/2 years on the script with McKenna, the veteran on the project. Known for his stage adaptations of Thérèse Raquin, Heidi and How Green Was My Valley, McKenna had been knocking out drafts of the Tolkien tale since 1999. Slowly, the fellowship of the Ring team came together, emboldened by the scope and audacity of the enterprise. But that solidarity didn't allay the creators' doubts, throughout rehearsals, about their quest and their sanity. "Every other day," Howell says, "one of us was wondering out loud, 'What. Are. We. Doing?' And that's good. It's very rare that you're asked to jump into completely uncharted waters."

As the boss, Wallace, 48, was taking the biggest jump. "If Lord of the Rings works, I have a company," he says starkly. "If Lord of the Rings doesn't work, I don't have a company." For Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group, he had supervised the international stagings of such hits as The Phantom of the Opera. By 2001 he was ready to make his own blockbuster. When he read McKenna's LOTR script, he saw the chance to produce a "curious mixed marriage of a mega, huge, spectacular epic event, with the use of language and text that required an audience to listen to it to absorb it." A thinking man's Cats.

He and his collaborators knew they wanted something fresh--not a carbon-copy pageant of the Jackson films, which were coming out as the work progressed. (Howell never did see them, saying, sensibly, "I don't need to carry someone else's ideas with me.") But it must have cheered the team to know that a 31/2-hr. sit wouldn't be a chore for audiences who had happily logged more than nine hours with the films.

To guarantee fidelity to the source, Wallace and crew consulted with a Tolkien expert and a scholar in "Elvish." (True to Tolkien's Oxford career as a professor of ancient languages, the show contains snatches of two Elvish dialects plus English and Old English.) The team debated which characters in the canon might be excluded without damaging the story or outraging fans. Treebeard and his fellow Ents were out, then in. (Good thing too: Toronto audiences clearly cherish Treebeard.) Wormtongue, King Theoden's adviser, was in, then out. A reference to Tom Bombadil survived a cut to one scene last Friday. The one major character absent is Faramir, brother of the warrior Boromir.

The show was originally planned to open in London, but the right venue was elusive. Wallace didn't want New York City as a launching pad. "It's such a fickle place," he says, alluding to the shift in the tone of Broadway musicals from dead serious (Les Miz, Phantom, Stephen Sondheim shows) to unabashedly frivolous (The Producers, Hair-spray, Spamalot). Chicago was a possibility but a dark horse; Toronto was offering a better package: C$3 million from Ontario, C$3 million from Toronto, a barter deal with Air Canada. The idea is to make Toronto a holiday destination--for LOTR to lure tourists, as Cirque du Soleil brings visitors to Las Vegas. (The scheme may be working: of the advance-sale ticket buyers, 23% are from the U.S.) Wallace also got fat checks from two local producer groups, David and Ed Mirvish and Michael Cohl. With the money Zaentz put in and raised from other sources, Wallace had finally found a home for his show.

And Warchus and Nightingale had hit on a strange solution for a score that wouldn't sound like old Broadway: split the songwriting chores between A.R. Rahman, the best-selling composer of Indian musical films, and the Finnish World Music group Varttina. Nightingale ran up his frequent-flyer miles jetting between London, Madras and Helsinki. In the end, Rahman was the main writer of the Elvish songs for Galadriel and Arwen, as well as the battle music for the scenes in the Marshes and Mordor. Varttina was mainly responsible for a rousing drinking song in the Inn at Bree and for the nostalgic ballad, Now and for Always--sung by Frodo and his friend Sam--and for a few bars by Gollum. Some pieces, like the anthem for the Helm's Deep siege, are, Nightingale says, "a totally collaborative effort."

In the first act, the show is laden with songs, in the manner of a conventional musical--except that some are so ethereal they are, as one hobbit says, "like wine for the ears." But as the tale darkens and deepens, LOTR turns into musical drama, with songs replaced by underscoring of the battles. And Frodo is never forced to belt out, "It don't mean a thing/ If I ain't got that ring."

This is, of course, an ensemble vehicle. The only name actor, Brent Carver (a 1993 Tony winner for Kiss of the Spider Woman), turns Gandalf into a curious, wispy thing, with eccentric line readings and maundering instead of majesty. Carver's off-putting mannerisms tilt the focus from Gandalf to the hobbits--leprechaunish here, with round bellies and bottoms, like the Munchkins in MGM's Oz--persuasively played by jockey-size actors. James Loye, as Frodo, and Peter Howe, as Sam, get the message that heroes are ordinary folk who rise under extraordinary circumstances. In this predominantly Canadian cast, the other main roles are handsomely filled. But the show stealer is Michael Therriault as Gollum. Hissing and squealing, writhing convulsively to express Gollum's two warring psyches (the hobbit he was, the half-life creature his ring lust has made of him), Therriault gives the most virtuoso schizo turn since Steve Martin's half man, half woman in All of Me.

For technical legerdemain and vaulting athleticism, LOTR can't match Kà, Cirque's Las Vegas martial-arts extravaganza. The Toronto show's battle scenes are pedestrian, and toward the end, a group of fierce warriors breaks into a heavy two-step, like clumsy backup singers in a doo-wop group. But this isn't an all-singing show, and it certainly isn't all dancing. It is a musical that becomes a spectacular morality play, an adventure with a soft and stricken heart.

At one point, Bilbo, the hobbit whose accidental custodianship of the ring would stoke the War of Middle-earth, plaintively asks, "Don't adventures ever have an end?" For Wallace, Warchus & Co., the answer is: not this one, not yet. Rather than a brisk, there-and-back-again jaunt, they are in the middle of a marathon. "Hopefully," says McKenna, "by the time we finish here, we'll have a very sound blueprint of the show we're going to do in London." They plan a West End opening of LOTR a year from now, then Hamburg or Berlin, perhaps Broadway in 2008. (Wallace has assured his Canadian partners that Toronto will be the show's only North American venue for 18 months.) But the New York City critics coming to see the show this week won't be looking for a blueprint. And McKenna insists, "This isn't a tryout. This is the real thing."

He's right. If this LOTR isn't quite the one Ring to rule them all, it's the real Middle-earth deal. Against odds that would make Aragon flinch, the Ring fellowship has staged the season's definitive megamusical, 560 km north of Times Square. For now, Broadway is off-Toronto.

• RICHARD CORLISS/Toronto