It might just be coincidence that this pageant-like, musicalized version of “The Lord of the Rings” opened officially at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on the same day as the Summer Olympics opening ceremony in Paris. But it’s also illuminating, as they bear resemblances aplenty.
Both have prominent images of circular fire and evocative horse puppets. There’s the epic sweep — the histories of France and J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy Middle Earth — requiring more summarizing than storytelling. There’s Celine Dion in Paris, and crystal-clear references to her stylings in Chicago.
They also, believe it or not, share the same length, which, admittedly, is quite different when you’re free to grab a drink while watching television versus waiting for the single intermission in a 3-plus hour show.
That’s not to suggest the stage show is boring. It’s not. It moves swiftly from scene to scene in this tale of hobbits Frodo (Spencer Davis Milford) and Sam (Michael Kurowski) venturing out from the safety of the Shire to save the world, with heroic help from dwarfs and elves and men and ultimately trees, by destroying an evil ring.
But its similarities to the Olympics ceremony are not all positive. Theater may have been born of ritual, but you don’t really want it to feel this distant, as if it’s going through the motions, even if those motions are occasionally grand.
Emotional involvement is not the strength of this “Lord of the Rings.” It’s more a sensory experience — thunderously loud sound effects, a plethora of projections that one could imagine at a trippy light show, and the use of all the hydraulic capacity in the very high-tech Yard Theater to lift people up and down or spin them around. It makes efforts at immersiveness by sending its actors into the audience, but that ends up in this case being both hokey and jarring.
The show makes a lot of assumptions that you know this tale, or at least its biggest twists. For example, it doesn’t even bother to depict much grief at Gandalf’s apparent death, which also, unfortunately, strips the later reunions of all feeling. It also tends to just tell us about important relationships rather than help us experience them.
Even Sam’s infinite loyalty to Frodo begins to feel like a duty because he never struggles with it. In fact, nobody, except for Gollum, struggles with any believable doubts in this version, which makes Tony Bozzuto’s physically and vocally remarkable performance as the deformed character all the more crowd-pleasing.
This is an adaptation with a history worthy of dramatization in its own right. In 2006, only three years after the last of the famed Peter Jackson-directed film trilogy was released, this musical was produced for a whopping $25 million dollars in Toronto and then London.
It became a tale of hubris. The reviews were generally scathing; the comment I recalled, and re-confirmed, was a published quote from Judi Dench, who said upon its West End opening: “It has wonderful choreography and the cast worked so hard.”
Fast forward to last year, when the Watermill Theater in England and its artistic director Paul Hart dusted off the script and score from the bin of forgotten flops and staged it in their small, 220-seat theater. The cast was reduced to half, and played all the instruments for the odd score that mixes the sound of Bollywood composer A.R. Rahman’s Indian and Finnish folk group Varttinna.
The reason that production was received well is obvious to see. The problem-solving is impressive, and the puppetry, designed by Charlie Tymms, can be terrific. There’s an extraordinary visual sequence involving a giant spider, made all the more effective by the subtle, dim lighting from Rory Beaton. It’s what you can’t see, or gradually see, that matters.
This Chicago staging, also directed by Hart but with a nearly all-Chicago cast, now moves back up again in size and effects, which may have been a mistake. The more it tries to be spectacular, the worse it can be. The chief example comes with the final disposition of the ring, where just as a minimal, movement-centered approach begins to present the possibility of becoming mesmerizing, it’s spoiled by the projection of giant hypnotic swirls to represent falling. It’s so trite, so distracting, so put-on, that it transforms the highly charged into the cheesy. At that moment and others, including the deadly sentimental last 10 minutes, the only real hope for this show would be a cos-playing audience ready to interact with this as they would a “Rocky Horror” outing.
In the end, I have to conclude that no production of this adaptation is ever going to be fully satisfying, because the composers wrote a film score rather than one where the songs become the dramatic scenes. This effort to revive it may have highs, but simply can’t overcome a structure that fundamentally separates the form of emotional communication — the music — from the narrative it’s supposed to tell.
Still, it’s unquestionable that everyone works very hard.