Moving heaven and (Middle) Earth

Few things could be harder than staging the most expensive theatrical production in history. Fewer still could be harder than adapting 1,200 plot- and action-filled pages, each of them worshiped by generations of readers, to a 3-1/2 hour show and setting it to music.

But perhaps the hardest part of bringing "The Lord of the Rings" to the stage is having to make major revisions just weeks before opening night.

Tell the ruthless, faceless Orcs to put down their swords before giving them the news. Mount stilts, duck the stage lights, and look a three-story-high Treebeard in the eye when you break it to him. Bounce the revisions off Gollum and wait for him to say that he's of two minds about it.

It's enough to test the fellowship of the company, never mind the Fellowship of the Ring. But these were the prospects that playwright Shaun McKenna stared down last week.

Mr. McKenna and director Matthew Warchus collaborated over four years to adapt J.R.R. Tolkien's novels for what producer Kevin Wallace describes as "a hybrid - one part drama, one part musical, one part spectacle." Previews opened at the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto in February after much hype - including the self-styled "biggest and most ambitious theatrical production ever" - and with inevitable comparisons to Peter Jackson's Oscar-decorated film trilogy.

Alas, when the curtain dropped on "Rings" on the first night of previews, it could have also been fairly described as "one-part endurance test" - the show ran at least 4-1/2 hours. Mordor threatened to beget torpor. "We thought we were telling the story as economically as we could, and we were still too long," McKenna says. "Since the early previews, we've addressed most of the length issues."

Still, McKenna rewrote the second act last week - not a change of a line here or there, but rather the deletion of one scene entirely and the shifting around of battles sequences. All of this required significant production changes, from lighting down to costume. "We did a restructure because the pacing of the second act was wrong," McKenna says. "There are huge technical effects when you move a scene." It was by his estimate, "the 30-somethingth draft," and each one has been "closer to Tolkien."

And closer to the 3-1/2 hour mark mandated by union contracts.

Such streamlining is typical in any big show, and a casual Tolkien devotee can pick up on threads of the story that have been pulled from the fabric of the stage production. (Farewell, Faramir.) Thus, adaptation gave way to readaptation. Scenes that were months in the making were shuffled, shifted, truncated, or discarded. And this will almost certainly continue until opening night March 23.

It's a show so sprawling that it spills from the stage before the curtain even lifts. While the audience files into the theater, Hobbits run around the aisles and stand on the arms of occupied seats chasing fireflies. It's a show so crowded with plot, characters, and song that Gollum makes his entrance poking out of the balcony in a high-wire act. It's a show so determined to draw in the audience that the first 20 rows were awash in dry ice and covered with something like confetti during one special effect.

Whether all this helps the stage version achieve similar commercial or critical success as the films (which earned $3 billion worldwide) remains to be seen.

Page: 1 | 2