NaNoLeopard 22,000 words and counting...
Moose and I went to see Lord of the Rings: the Musical, to celebrate her birthday on Tuesday. We’d both been looking forward to it for ages so were in a state of huge excitement when we got to the theatre.
The tickets had promised that “Middle Earth comes alive 15 minutes before showtime” and I’d had images of foliage waving about, but in fact it was a bunch of hobbits on the stage using a net to catch little star-like things floating about in the air. Interesting. At 7.30 they started line-dancing, which was more like it.
Visually the production was stunning, with the stage spinning round frequently to reveal another set, and operating at different levels. The lighting was also great, and the monsters were absolutely terrifying – particularly the Nazgul and Shelob. Shelob was enormous and had eight puppeteers operating her legs, which gave her ghastly spider-like movements.
Early on, Bilbo put on the ring and disappeared, and we were quite gobsmacked – I still haven’t worked out how they did it!
There were also some amazing acrobatics, with orcs spinning all over the place – a couple of them on false legs which reminded me of Oscar Pistorius. Others had elongated arms, and at one point they came down the aisle into the audience and started terrorising people. I had known this would happen because C had tipped me off, and it was amusing seeing the orcs snarling at people. Then we suddenly realised that in the row in which Moose and I were sitting, the two seats next to us were empty, and next to them was the side aisle – so I was in the firing line. Sure enough an orc emerged from the side door and started prodding me in the leg and snarling which was really quite unpleasant. I wish I could pretend I was the Iron Leopard and stabbed him with my emergency corkscew, but in fact it was hard to know how to react so I gave him a shove and eventually he went away to bother somebody else.
After that I was traumatised which manifested itself in a fit of the giggles when Aragorn, whose voice was like Richard Dawkins (or Professor Yaffle in Bagpuss) started singing – I had hoped that he might have a nice singing voice to compensate for his grating speaking voice, but no such luck. Frodo also annoyed us because he spoke with a yokellish accent – which might be fine for Sam Gamgee but isn’t Frodo supposed to be a posh hobbit? Everyone else was good though – Gandalf hamming it up with his staff-twirling, and Gollum was excellent, capering about in a disturbing way.
The music was patchy – I enjoyed the dancing on tables in the pub number, and there was another traditional hobbit folk song that was ok, but otherwise there was rather too much Enya-style warbling from the elf women which wasn’t really my cup of tea.
The story had been edited a lot – the first half was the Fellowship of the Ring and then they combined the two other books in the second half, and skipped a lot of battles. Which made sense, as there might have been diminishing returns otherwise. The whole thing lasted for 3 hours, which was about right. All in all we had an excellent time and I shall remember it for the rest of my life!
