The Lord of the Rings: A Musical Tale review – a rollicking but uneven highlight reel
If you’ve ever longed to explore the worlds of Middle-earth – the cosy village of Hobbiton, the fantastical Elvish sanctuary of Rivendell, or even the fiery pits of Mordor (weird choice, but you do you) – you’d better get a seat in the stalls at The Lord of the Rings: A Musical Tale, now playing at Sydney’s State theatre. The story happens all around you.
An delightful, extended pre-show has hobbits running all over the aisles, greeting the audience, posing for photos, and welcoming us all to Bilbo Baggins’ “eleventy-first” birthday party, the event that kicks off the action in JRR Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy. There’s ring toss, social dancing and chatter. For a moment, you’re a hobbit. It’s safe, warm and lovely.
From there, things get shaky – and not just because we, and our hobbit heroes Frodo (Rarmian Newton), his loyal gardener Samwise (Wern Mak), and cousins Merry (Jeremy Campese) and Pippin (Hannah Buckley), are about to set forth on a dangerous quest to destroy to an inordinately powerful ring.
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After all, how can you cram The Lord of the Rings into a single evening of theatre? Obviously, you can’t; Peter Jackson released extended cuts of his beloved film trilogy to help cover the most important plot points, foreshadowing, and relationships, and those clocked in at more than 11 hours in total (and still couldn’t do it all). The Rings of Power, soon to return for a third season on Amazon Prime, is heavily based on appendices and other marginalia alone.
At a certain point, this musical stops trying to do it all. Don’t bring your friends who don’t know the material; it’s going to go right over the heads of the uninitiated. All night, all around me, I could hear whispered questions and hurried, hushed explanations. But for those familiar with the story, you could do worse than this, which functions as something as a highlight reel and wants to delight you with the tale’s greatest hits.
All throughout, the action continues to spill out into the stalls, the adventurers journeying down aisles and clustering near the front rows for expansive crowd scenes, which keeps us involved in the rollicking, relentless forward march of plot.
But it’s all so condensed that it borders on silly. The events of the first book take up the entirety of the sprawling, too-long first act, the second is squeezed into what feels like just a few minutes at the top of Act 2 before we linger on the end of the journey and its epilogue. But there are delights along the way.
There’s Laurence Boxhall, who runs away with the whole show as Gollum, singing in that voice and crawling all over the stage, all limbs and inexhaustible hunger for the ring. There’s Stefanie Caccamo as Arwen, who possesses one of musical theatre’s most glorious voices, and Jemma Rix, who has one of the most show-stopping, as Galadriel, both overcoming a bare-bones script (by Shaun McKenna and Matthew Warchus) and strikingly ugly costumes (a running theme across the board; Aragorn looks like a tall Peter Pan).
There’s also the astonishingly hard-working ensemble, who pass around instruments to share the duties of making the score together. Composed by AR Rahman (Bombay, Slumdog Millionaire), Finnish folk band Värttinä and Christopher Nightingale (orchestrations and additional music for Matilda the Musical), the music is a baffling, sometimes otherworldly, and mostly pretty combination of patchwork folk, pop and balladry. When the cast lay down their instruments to play cargo-pant-wearing orcs or puppet Nazgul-heads, you’re seeing what looks like exhaustive and joyful work, and that makes the daffy edges of this production easier to bear: it’s best when it’s playful. But it could be more playful.
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Directed by Paul Hart, this revival was built for a small UK stage that broke out from the theatre and into the gardens. In Sydney, it’s swallowed up by the State theatre, its effects both repetitive and cheap-looking because we’re in such a traditional space, robbed of the intimacy that can charm us up close.
Still, late in the second act, when Frodo and Sam are on the last stages of the journey to destroy the ring, just two hobbits against the world, something unexpected happens. They sing a beautiful duet about friendship; Frodo falters; Sam carries him. And all around me, I heard telltale sounds of sniffles, saw the discreet motions of people wiping their eyes. After all the silliness – I cannot stress enough that the orcs are wearing cargo pants – they had still managed to get us right in the feels. That’s the power of The Lord of the Rings for you.
The Lord of the Rings: A Musical Tale is on at Sydney’s State theatre until 1 February, then Perth 19 March–4 April, Melbourne 26 April–30 May, and Gold Coast 4–20 July