Gandalf in Greasepaint

By Richard Corliss/Toronto

In eerie strobe light, a black rider rears its steed (a man and puppet on stilts), sending fearful hobbits scurrying. Dead men rise from the Marshes (a roiling silver sheet) to make war against Sauron's legions. In the Mountains of Moria, Gandalf battles the enormous Balrog (an Erector-set confection with steaming orange eyes) as the sound effects roar and a strong wind gusts from the stage, spraying the audience with a blizzard of black confetti. As for Frodo, he not only lives, he also sings in the new version of The Lord of the Rings, opening this week at the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto.

A stage musical of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy saga? Good Lord, why? Well, for starters, because the original three-volume story was filled with music--more than 50 songs that added levity and lyricism to the military drumbeat of its narrative. And also because: Why not? LOTR is certainly an alluring franchise; it's one of the most popular and beloved works in publishing history and (sorry, George Lucas) the all-time top-grossing movie trilogy. So producer Kevin Wallace raised about $24 million, from private and Canadian government sources, to mount a 3 1/2-hr. epic--the longest musical this side of Wagner--and the most expensive Broadway-style show ever, though it's at least two years from playing New York City.

The preparation for a typical musical has its familiar anxieties: cutting a favorite song, replacing a dialogue scene, finding some extra business for the star. That's nothing compared with the three-year ordeal of bringing Middle-earth to life. The mostly British creative team, beginning with playwright Shaun McKenna, had to figure out how to choreograph the complex battles Tolkien described; how to visualize the dozen realms in the saga and the dozens of characters of many species; how to blend narrative, drama and music in a three-act production--and do it all without retakes or post-production computer effects. Most daunting 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.

If it occurs to you that the idea is mad, you aren't the first. "I thought it was foolish," said director Matthew Warchus. He believed it would be "instantly plausible" to do the Ring as a spoof. "It's such an earnest story, and people are so protective of it." Still, he signed on. Then he and musical supervisor Christopher Nightingale chose to break with the Broadway songwriting style and go for an ethereal, world-music sound. Two sounds, in fact: one from A.R. Rahman, the best-selling composer of Indian musical films; the other from the Finnish group Vaerttinae.

That produced a fascinating musical fusion, but it didn't allay the doubts that most of the creators had, straight through rehearsals, about their quest and their sanity. Says set and costume designer Rob Howell: "Every other day one of us was wondering out loud, 'What. Are. We. Doing?'"

What they have done, as a visit to the show in its last week of previews revealed, is to create a robust summary and emotional evocation of the story--the one LOTR you can consume in a single evening and say, with a satisfied smile, "Yes. That's it."

The hobbits--leprechaunish, with round bellies and bottoms, like the Munchkins in MGM's Oz--are persuasively played by jockey-size actors. The Shire and its environs are suggested less by sets than by delicately sylvan projections. Rivendell's High Elves are just that: they rise and float serenely (on wires) above the hobbits. The Winnebago-size Shelob tries to wrap her spidery tentacles around a struggling Frodo with the help of six black-clad puppeteers.

This LOTR can't match Cirque du Soleil's Las Vegas martial-arts extravaganza K`a for soaring athleticism or technical legerdemain. The visualization of battle scenes is often pedestrian, and toward the end, the choreography makes the Orcs look less like brutal mercenaries than clumsy backup singers. But if the show's ingenuity stumbles now and then, its narrative is always clear and plangent. It locates the melancholy soul at the heart of Tolkien's adventure story.

And what of the music? The first hour suggests an ambitious but conventional musical, with a rousing drinking song and some lovely Elvish ballads that, as one hobbit in the show says, are "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. The last real song, and it's a beaut, comes at the end of Act II: Frodo and his friend Sam Gamgee sing in reminiscence of the Shire they love, "Now and for always."

The cast is well led by James Loye as Frodo and Peter Howe as Sam. Brent Carver, a Tony winner for Kiss of the Spider Woman, turns Gandalf into a curious, wispy thing, with eccentric line readings and maundering instead of majesty. But Michael Therriault's Gollum is a sensation. As he hisses, squeals and writhes to express Gollum's two warring psyches (the hobbit he was, the half-life wreck his ring lust has made of him), Therriault gives the most astonishing, show-stealingly schizo performance since Steve Martin's half-man-half-woman in All of Me.

At one point, Bilbo, the hobbit whose accidental custodianship of the ring would lead to 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. They plan a London opening of LOTR a year from now, then Berlin or Hamburg, perhaps Broadway in 2008. (Contracts that Wallace has signed with his Canadian co-producers require that Toronto be the show's only North American venue for 18 months.) But, McKenna insists, "this isn't a tryout. This is the real thing."

He's right. If this isn't quite the one Ring to rule them all, it's the real Middle-earth deal. Against odds that would make Aragorn wince, the Ring fellowship has staged a definitive megamusical, nearly 350 miles north of Times Square. For now, Broadway is off-Toronto.

With reporting by Reported by Steven Frank/Toronto