The Lord Of The Rings (Original London Production)

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For nearly half a century after its publication, J.R.R. Tolkien's popular three-part fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings was considered impossible to adapt into another medium, an opinion director Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated film version seemed only to confirm. But in the early years of the 21st century, director Peter Jackson overcame the novel's difficulties to the satisfaction of millions of filmgoers with his movie trilogy, and it turns out that theatrical producer Kevin Wallace was at the same time laboring to turn The Lord of the Rings into a stage musical. Wallace's task would seem to be the more daunting one. Jackson had the advantages of both movie magic and running time, while Wallace was trying to tell the long and complicated story live and in a single sitting; he also wanted to add music. Nevertheless, the success of the Jackson films gave him a built-in audience (in addition to the one he would inherit from the books themselves). A reported $25 million was spent on the initial production in Toronto in 2006, resulting in mixed reviews and a six-month run. Another £12.5 million went toward a revised version that opened in London's West End on June 19, 2007. This cast album, released on the Kevin Wallace label (he covers all bases), presents an hour of music drawn from the three-hour production. It demonstrates the ambitions and intentions of the Lord of the Rings stage musical, at least from a musical point of view.
A show of this scope, it seems, couldn't have just one songwriter or songwriting team; it needed a committee. Wallace seems to have decided he needed to draw together a score from three different areas. He needed conventional stage musical music of the sort most popular in Britain, i.e., the lavish sub-operetta (or power ballad) music of Andrew Lloyd Webber. For this, he employed Lloyd Webber protégé Christopher Nightingale. He needed folkish but exotic music to represent the race of elf-like Hobbits at the center of the story. For this, he went to Finland and hired the nine members of the Finnish folk group Värttinä. And he needed dramatic orchestral music more akin to a film score than a stage musical. So, he added Bollywood master A.R. Rahman (also something of a Lloyd Webber protégé, having written music for the Lloyd Webber-produced show Bombay Dreams). Lyrics, such as they were, were to be handled by librettist Shaun McKenna and director Matthew Warchus. That group of creators tells a lot about the resulting score, which varies from those familiar-sounding power ballads ("The Song of Hope," "Wonder") to the folkish tunes ("The Road Goes On," "Now and for Always") to the instrumental music that sounds like it was written for an adventure movie ("The Siege of the City of Kings," "The Final Battle").
It may be an appropriate score for a show that seems to be more of a spectacle that a musical in the usual sense. But as an album of music, it isn't compelling. McKenna and Warchus have chosen to invent their own Tolkien-inspired languages for the lyrics in some cases, which means that often they function more as mysterious sounds than as meaningful words. (Actually, the translations in the CD book don't help.) The score gives very little idea of the characters or the plot, except when it serves largely as a backdrop to dialogue, which occurs once toward the end in "Gollum/Sméagol," when that conflicted character argues with himself about whether to steal that ring that's causing all the fuss. Clearly, Wallace wanted The Lord of the Rings to be a stage event on the order of Les Misérables. It doesn't sound like he succeeded. (The album contains both a CD and a DVD-A, the latter displaying a photo gallery of production and rehearsal shots while the music plays in regular stereo or 5.1 Surround Sound.) (The Lord of the Rings announced the closing of the London production on July 19, 2008, after a run of 492 performances.)

© William Ruhlmann /TiVo