Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Lord of the Rings the Musical?

Before anything else, I must apologise to any regular readers of this blog (all one or two of you) for not updating in the past few days. Unforuntaely, I am still somewhat under the weather. In fact, I don't think I've felt worse in my life, at least not for a long while, than the past several days.

Anyhow, today I read a news story that just astounds me. There is going to be a £11.5 million stage production of The Lord of the Rings. What's more is that it is a musical, the most expensive musical in the history of man. Fortunately, producer Kevin Wallace says that there will be no singing or dancing Hobbits. They are going to use traditional music, drawing on ethnic traditions.

As much as I love Lord of the Rings and musicals, I can't picture a musical based on the book. The biggest hurdle I can see is that it took Peter Jackson three separate movies, each around 3 hours each, to adapt the book. And even then Tolkien purists complain that he left things out. I don't see how a stage musical could manage to adapt the entire book, especially when one adds in the songs necessary to qualify it as a musical. Another hurdle I can see is that the idea of a musical based on Lord of the Rings also brings to mind that episode of The Simpsons in which Troy McClure performed in a musical version of Planet of the Apes (the original with Charlton Heston, not the remake with Marky Mark...). In other words, even without singing and dancing Hobbits, I fear it could come off as just plain silly. Of course, I suppose if someone had told me twenty years ago that there would be a musical based on Phantom of the Opera, I would have thought that silly, too...

Anyway, here's a link to a news story on the musical: Yahoo News: Lord of the Rings Musical

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