The Lord of the Rings Musical

[Alatar]

Latest Trailer and Documentaries available here:

http://82.112.100.50/hosting/lotr/dvd-p ... -flash.htm

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Thanks, Al. You know, when this project was first announced, I was quite skeptical at the idea of capturing the LOTR in one musical. But I am very impressed with what I have seen. I now think that there is a good chance that it will be a worthy addition to the lore of Middle-earth.

[MaidenOfTheShieldarm]

I am definitely looking forward to this. Two of my favourite things in one: LOTR AND theatre.

I'm skeptical, but excited at the same time.

I watched the video you linked to on B77. I was intrigued by what the director said about literally taking people to Middle Earth, making the theatre into a whole other world. I liked that.

[Jnyusa]

This looks very exciting to me too. Generally theatre has always appealed to me more than film has.

Jn

[MaidenOfTheShieldarm]

You clearly have excellent taste, Jn. (Not that that wasn't already obvious.)

[JewelSong]

I will be traveling to Toronto the weekend of February 10th to see this - I've had my tickets for ages! I am very much looking forward to it; like Jnyusa, I am a big fan of theater.

I see no reason why LOTR cannot be a successful stage play. The length of the book does not present a problem - look what they did with Les Miserables - that book is huge!

If they capture the basic "feel" of the story and of Middle Earth, it stands a good shot at being successful!

[Alatar]

I agree with you Jewel. In fact I've already seen a stage production of Lord of the Rings. Granted it left out a lot but it was at least an hour shorter than this production will be. It was a production by the Canadian "Theatre Sans Fils" Company using a mixture of puppetry and live actors. This version was aimed at children yet still managed to cover the majority of the story in a simple fashion in about 2 hours.

Photos here:

http://www.theatresansfil.com/seigneur/seigneur.html

[Alatar]

Latest news:

By JOHN MCKAY

Monday, December 12, 2005 Posted at 7:31 PM EST

Canadian Press

Like an orc invasion, the media descended on a stark east-end rehearsal studio Monday for what producers promised would be a "taste" of the massive theatrical production of Lord of the Rings, scheduled to open in February.

With no props, costumes, sets or lighting — just a bare stage and some recorded music — six excerpts from the three-hour, $27-million Mirvish production based on J.R.R. Tolkien's beloved fantasy trilogy were performed in front of an outsider audience for the very first time.

"The world is waiting for Toronto, for Ontario, for Canada to offer this great epic story to it for the first time ever," Irish-born producer Kevin Wallace declared to the gathered throng.

"Yes, it's a world premiere and it is yours!"

There were majestic, menacing stilt walkers depicting those dreaded ringwraiths, diminutive actors as Frodo Baggins and his Hobbit company, wooden swords, fair elf maidens and a simple gold ring in the centre of it all.

And less than eight weeks from now, when the whole thing is ready to be unveiled on the city's Princess of Wales stage, impressive special effects are promised too, the theatre's own unique equivalent of the kind of digital effects that made the Peter Jackson film trilogy such an impressive cinema experience.

But the Rings stage experience will be attracting fans from far and wide, fans who may not be regular theatregoers, who may be more used to the ready-made audio-visual stimuli provided by movies.

Wallace didn't see that as a problem.

"This is a scale the likes of which frankly nobody will have seen before," he promised. "You're standing within 15 feet of Frodo. You can see the sweat on his brow. You can see the emotion in his eyes. And you're breathing the same air. That's a unique experience in the theatre."

And he rejected the suggestion that theatre is somehow an elitist experience.

"The theatre's a popular art form. It's a terrible thing when people think 'Oh this is just for a certain section of society,' It's not. The theatre's for everybody."

Canadian actor Brent Carver, who plays Gandalf, said the films were beautiful and Sir Ian McKellen was fantastic as the grey-bearded wizard. But he agreed the stage can offer extraordinary things.

"A simplicity that I think only the theatre can really give to a live audience, you know?"

And then there's music. Lilting solos, symphonic crescendos and mournful, eerie choruses.

"Mr. Jackson did an extraordinary job but they didn't include any of the songs," stressed Carver. "The book is filled with people expressing themselves fundamentally with music. Absolutely fundamental to their existence. Middle Earth was sung into existence."

The score was assembled from diverse sources: A.R. Rahman from India, the Finnish folk music group Varttina and British composer Christopher Nightingale. And Carver said it all works.

"Tolkien was mad about Nordic myths and the Finnish language, actually, and languages period. So it's very interesting that the world of Finland and India and Britain and Canada is all coming together in a way. . .to speak an international language."

If all goes well, the production will, within a year's time, be headed for London's West End. And eventually to Broadway.

"Yeah, but no hurry, though," said Wallace, content that Canada will always be where it began.

"It's going to be the place that I think Tolkien fans will come on pilgrimage to, to see the original production in Toronto."

Both Wallace and Carver admitted being nervous about presenting such a barebones sneak preview at this time, but they agreed that it will be positive for the production.

"It's actually good for the actors to taste what it's like to play this in front of an audience," said Wallace. "So it's a bit of a shot in the arm halfway through the rehearsal process. It did feel good."

Carver admitted it was nerve-wracking but there was "a very good feel in the room."

Wallace was asked, after following in filmmaker Peter Jackson's footsteps, if King Kong might be next for a theatrical musical.

"What a good idea!" he exclaimed.

[Alatar]

Thanks to Wilma for this one! It's a clip of some rehearsal with interviews with the actors playing Frodo and Sam and a very short snippet of one of Frodo's songs.

http://www.spacecast.com/hypaspace.aspx

Scroll down and click on "Lord of the Rings: The Musical"

[Alatar]

And another, longer clip:

http://www.broadway.com/gen/Buzz_Video.aspx?ci=522858

[JewelSong]

This looks fantastic!

I have tickets for February 11!!!

[Alatar]

This looks fantastic!

I have tickets for February 11!!!

Have I told you lately that I hate you?

Of course all will be forgiven if you can smuggle in a video camera...

[Alatar]

From the Globe

By MICHAEL POSNER

Monday, January 9, 2006 Posted at 3:48 AM EST

From Monday's Globe and Mail

Christopher Nightingale doesn't mind admitting that when he first heard London producer Kevin Wallace discuss plans for a stage musical based on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, he thought "it was a really bad idea."

Of course, Nightingale is quick to add that when the notion was first broached three years ago, it was premised on an entirely different theatrical template than the $27-million show that will have its world premiere at Toronto's Princess of Wales Theatre on March 23 (after six weeks in previews beginning Feb. 2).

The production's musical supervisor and arranger, Nightingale, 39, says the original concept was more along the lines of traditional sung-through musicals like Les Misérables or works by Andrew Lloyd Webber. "And to be completely candid," he said during a recent lunch-hour rehearsal break, "I was extremely skeptical."

At Wallace's urging, however, he agreed to meet with the designated director, Matthew Warchus, to explore the possibilities. "I think Matthew was pretty much of the same opinion as I was. He didn't really want to do it. But we had a very interesting meeting. I suppose it was seminal. I think maybe he was looking to see if I was an idiot or not."

Their discussion focused on whether it would be possible to find a musical approach that would be faithful to the spirit of Tolkien's trilogy, "one that would have its own identity." Then, Nightingale says, "it became quite an exciting project, because it was an opportunity to create something from scratch," something unlike anything that had been done before.

One of the first things they did was buy a Tom Waits CD (ironically called Black Rider). Their thinking was that a key problem to solve was how to write dark music without making it sound hackneyed and melodramatic. Waits, they thought, might provide a spark of inspiration.

"There's something chaotic and interesting and left-field about that piece," he explains. "Now, that's not what the show is about at all, but it meant to us that there was an alternative."

Both Nightingale and Warchus continued to dance around a full commitment to the show, still seeking an approach that would prove compelling. By that time, designer Rob Darling was also involved and all three, together with the script's co-writer Shaun McKenna, began a collaborative dialogue that, in Nightingale's experience, was unprecedented for the theatre.

More typically, a show's music and book are written first and everything else -- sets, costumes, choreography -- is adapted to make it work. With The Lord of the Rings, the process seems to have been much more organic, so that an idea for staging might inspire a musical approach or a change in the architecture of a given scene.

Working with John Havu, a producer who was attached to the project early on, Nightingale went on a global search for earthy and ethnic world music that might fit the evolving theatrical vision. "We weren't entirely sure what this ethnic idea might be, but we thought that if heard it, it would inspire something. So John and I basically divided the world. I was listening to everything from the Silk Road to southern India, a lot of Gypsy music, and he was covering off northern Europe."

It was Havu, therefore, who stumbled upon Varttina, Finland's most popular folk ensemble, founded in the early 1980s. The first album Havu heard was Ilmatar (Goddess of Air), issued in 2000.

"It's an extraordinary CD," says Nightingale "and there's a specific track, Aijo [Old Man], about a man who gets bitten by a snake and casts a spell upon the snake.

"The music vividly conjures up the entire story and you can imagine this whole Grimm's fairy-tale scene with the gnarled trees, shadows. We heard that and went, 'wow.' So we listened to other CDs as well and their more joyful music, but this piece was specifically exciting because it was a route in the dark aspect of the show."

Nightingale then called Varttina's manager, who sent a one-line text message to Janne Lappalainen, then rehearsing for a jazz concert, asking if he was interested in doing a stage production of The Lord of the Rings. Lappalainen, a saxophone and bouzouki player who joined Varttina at 14 (he's now 34) sent back a one-word answer: Yes.

Lappalainen says his initial reaction, when Nightingale joined the group for shows in Helsinki and on tour, was that the project was "exciting but scary, given the size of it."

Even then, says Nightingale, it had occurred to him that Varttina's sound, rich as it was, might not be the show's only musical motif. "Because just as the music should reflect the story's white and black and shades of grey, so should the music reflect the entire spectrum," he says. "There's a particular harmonic sound at one end of the spectrum and a different harmonic sound at the other end, and I thought what would be interesting would be the collision of the two."

Nightingale had in mind Indian composer A. H. Rahman, with whom he had worked on the ill-fated Broadway musical Bombay Dreams.

"I was asked what crazy man thinks you can combine Finnish world music with Indian music, and my answer to that is that Tolkien's world inhabits the world, and the music within it inhabits the entire world. And having worked with Rahman, I knew what a chameleon he is, what a sponge. He's wonderful at absorbing something and spitting something out that has a little bit of him in it."

Nightingale e-mailed Rahman, and "he came over to London and said 'Should I do it?' And I said 'Yeah.' There was nothing grand about it."

As it stands, the final score includes songs and music written by Varttina alone, songs and music written by Rahman alone, and some that combine their efforts, and Nightingale's.

"That is what makes it interesting," he says, "the marriage of the two styles."

Rahman, a major composing presence in India's Bollywood film industry, concedes that "this was a big step mentally for me, to go to a collaborative venture, because I've always done solo work. But this is what the piece needs. It's not possible for a single composer, and that suited me perfectly."

The low compositional point, he says, came with Shelob, the five-metre spider who threatens the hobbits in Act III. "Everyone has their nemesis and ours was Shelob," he says, "how to do it without making it sound like bad, scary-spider music. The window of getting it right was very narrow." The final result, Nightingale says, is largely Varttina's music.

"The whole thing could have been disastrous," Nightingale concedes. "But as it turns out, both Rahman and Varttina were genuinely excited by what the other had done." Some pieces went back and forth several times, each composer adding and subtracting touches until they were satisfied.

"There wasn't much room for ego," Rahman says. Or as Nightingale says, heading back into rehearsal, "the show is the boss here."

[JewelSong]

*dies of anticipation*

[Rowanberry]

I hope they will publish a soundtrack at some point.

[Alatar]

According to the Producers a soundtrack should be available shortly after the Premiere. I am eagerly awaiting it!

[JewelSong]

I bought my plane tix today. You can bet that if they have a CD of the soundtrack available at the show I attend, I will be buying one.



4 weeks to go!

[yovargas]

Wow, Tom Waits. Anybody here familiar with him? He's very much a one of a kind, a very original musician. That they saw his stuff as an inspirational starting point means that they are indeed going for something very different with this. This sounds fascinating.

[Alatar]

yova, if you get a chance, I'd recommend checking out Varrtina as well. They are extremely unusual and "otherwordly" isn th3eir style of harmony and their Finnish lyrics do sound very Elvish. If you check out the links above you can hear a little of the music from the show in those documentary clips. It does seem extremely interesting both musically and visually.

[vison]

It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, to see all that about Finnish musicians in the article from the Globe and Mail.

Tolkien supposedly was madly in love with the Finnish language, and wasn't it supposedly the form he chose for the Elven languages?

This could be good.

A friend of mine has tix, but she's not going until May, near the end of its projected run.