The Lord of the Ring’s on stage

The stage version of the Lord of the Rings will make its appearance on March 23, 2006 at Toronto’s Princess of Wales theater.

PRAVEENA SHIVRAM

14 March 2006
CHENNAI, INDIA

After a lot of rewriting, rehashing and refurbishing, the much-awaited stage version of the epic, The Lord of the Rings, is making its appearance on March 23 rd at Toronto's Princess of Wales theater. And the music is by our own celebrated music director, A R Rahman, along with a Finnish band, Varttina.

In an interview to DNA Mumbai, Rahman said that working for the stage version of this epic tale was challenging. "I have been working on this for more than two years," said Rahman, adding this was the longest project he had been involved with.

While the Rings stage production is not a musical, it uses music extensively and Rahman has said he was approached to bring an orchestral tone to the folk music of Varttina.

When I had met him last year, just before the debut of the play in London (which incidentally never took off), Rahman said, "It was extremely challenging working for this, as one musical demanded so much out of me creatively. There was the ring theme, the last battle, etc… It became a lot more difficult, as the movie is already such a hit and has created a mark for itself. So we wanted to establish our own thing, and tried to give it a complete new soul. A good tune was never enough. We had to create an impact, and match the entire thing to the script. Moreover, it was an incredible experience working with Varttina, who were so good that there was always pressure for me to perform better."

It was Kevin Wallace's vision all the way. A young man from Limerick, Ireland, Wallace, this one-time actor found his way into producing after working for Andrew Lloyd Webber. Along with Shaun McKenna and Mathew Warchus, the next four years was spent in adapting the 1,200 pager into "a hybrid - one part drama, one part musical, one part spectacle." But when it previewed last month, the four-and-half hour drama proved to be excruciatingly long, and the second act was completely rewritten. The stage version now runs at three-and-a-half hours, with nearly 60 actors in the cast, with the estimate of the show at 23 million dollars and still counting. Which makes it bigger than the hugely successful Phantom of the Opera, which if priced today, comes up to 12 million dollars.

Comparisons to Peter Jackson's film are inevitable. Considering the film made 3 billion dollars worldwide, expectations for this stage version are huge. But as Wallace says, "We are not putting the films on stage; we are putting the books on stage."

As for Rahman, while this is his second international stage venture, after Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bombay Dreams, he says that the music for The Lord of the Rings has no pop scores, a la Shakalaka Baby or Chaiyya Chaiyya used for the previous musical.