Long before Peter Jackson brought the Lord of the Rings to the big screen, a musical was in the offing. Now, it’s finally here.
As the credits rolled on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001, Shaun McKenna sat in a UK cinema watching more carefully than most. McKenna, now an avuncular 67-year-old, wasn’t watching as an avid fan wanting to pick holes in or lavish praise on Sir Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s fantasy epic. Rather, the British playwright, screenwriter, librettist and lyricist wanted to see if it would conflict with his own plans.
Since the late 1990s, McKenna had been one of a team toying with the idea of a stage musical adaptation of Tolkien’s book. That team included Matthew Warchus and Christopher Nightingale, both of whom later brought Matilda the Musical to life, composer AR Rahman, whose Slumdog Millionaire score earned him two academy awards, and the Finnish folk group Värttinä.
“I went to see the films reluctantly because I didn’t really want to be influenced by somebody else’s version of the story,” McKenna says. “There was also a fear that we would be perceived as ‘piggybacking’ on the success of the films when, in fact, this whole idea predates the films.
“Once they came out, there was a little dance to do because we didn’t want to clash with those in any way, so it took us – and it always takes a long time to get a musical on – about seven years.
“The films were so long and so huge and so spectacular – so visually amazing – that you could never recreate that in a theatre, but the story itself, the heart of the story is very human, very intimate, about the relationships between the characters. We had a sense of finding a different way of doing things, of telling that story, that would work in a theatrical context.”
And so “the dance” began.
A 2006 multimillion dollar production in Toronto, seen by 400,000 people, ran for seven months – give or take a week or two – and won multiple local performing arts awards (the Dora Awards), including Outstanding New Musical. It was loved and loathed by critics. The following year – slightly re-worked and with a shorter script – it became one of the most expensive musicals ever produced in London’s West End, running for 13 months with 492 performances. Like the Toronto season, reviews ran the gamut from raves to rubbish.
Planned tours, including to New Zealand, never eventuated and, as more films kept coming, the musical went quiet; that is until the Covid pandemic and subsequent lockdowns forced the “small but mighty” Watermill Theatre in Berkshire, west of London, to consider using its shire-like outdoor area for performances.
Watermill Theatre’s artistic director Paul Hart remembered The Lord of the Rings: A Musical Tale.
“We have this beautiful outdoor space,” says Hart, “and I started thinking about ways we could stage the show as the most intimate but epic thing you could imagine in the space.” With that, Hart, on a Zoom call from his Watermill office, turns the screen to face the theatre’s “beautiful and luscious” gardens and the shire emerges.
Directed by Hart, The Lord of the Rings: A Musical Tale won a four-star review in the Guardian, where critic Mark Lawson wrote: “On a stage about 30 times smaller – with a budget presumably reduced proportionately – this spectacle of compression, by aiming small, brings big rewards.”
Changes have been made since the early 2000s version; the plot has been condensed, leaving out some subplots and characters, including Eowyn, Eomer and Faramir. Hart admits to initial nerves about those omissions.
“But choices have to be made and what Shaun has done brilliantly is that he’s managed to encompass all the key moments and referenced a number of things that we just don’t have time to go into in more detail,” says Hart.
“The skill of what has been created is that it brings Tolkien fans in and makes them feel like there is just total respect for the source material and where it has come from.”
McKenna estimates he has read the books five or six times, paying particular attention to the text the play focuses on.
“They’re big books, 1100 pages; that’s a lot of pages,” he says.
Was deciding what to include and what to leave out one of the greatest challenges?
“Well, yes and no but we decided pretty early on that the heart of the story is in Frodo, Sam and Gollum. That’s where the characters are the most three-dimensional and the most human.”
Casting, says McKenna, was probably one of the biggest challenges because they needed performers who went above and beyond the “triple threat” – of being able to act, dance and sing – and who could also play musical instruments and learn puppetry.
And, of course, he adds, that they had to look a bit like hobbits and most of us have an idea in mind of what hobbits should look like. He describes it as “a bit homespun”. Thankfully, McKenna adds, there was no need for tall actors.
“The notion is that everyone’s a hobbit and part of the re-telling of this story. We did want diversity in the cast. That was really key to us because this is a global story.”
The success of the Watermill Theatre production has given the show a second life, which has taken it to Chicago and now on that long-imagined Australasian tour, premiering at The Civic in Auckland.
“The fact that New Zealand came up as an option felt so perfect for us,” says McKenna. “You know, it really does feel like we’re sort of bringing the story home in some sense.”
He describes the show as more of a response to the books, focused on the humanity, courage and heroism of the hobbits. Audiences are welcomed in as if they’re guests at Bilbo Baggins’ birthday party and invited to hear the tale of a fantastic adventure.
“We say to people, ‘come and join this epic adventure’, but you also have to use your imagination,” says McKenna. “It’s not a musical in the conventional sense, in that you don’t have characters singing: ‘and now I will go to Mordor. I will get the ring’, because that would be really peculiar.
“Instead, it’s a show in which the whole world is musical. Tolkien’s world was musical; Middle-earth was sung into being, so the hobbits are singing the songs of Middle-earth, telling and sharing their story with us, and it grows organically out of that.”
Hart says the production also shows “the mechanics” behind it. Battle and some action scenes, for example, are told using puppetry (look out for the Black Riders with giant skeleton horseheads).
But it doesn’t mean special effects have been eliminated altogether. Lighting plays a big role in the creation of the Balrog monster and, says McKenna, the giant spider Shelob is one of the most extraordinary things he’s ever seen on stage.
“It basically takes over the entire stage space. I’m not going to reveal anything more about it but it’s very exciting.”
The Lord of the Rings: A Musical Tale plays at The Civic, Auckland, November 6-December 1.
