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LOTR Jumps the Shark
eggoeater writes "The latest incarnation of The Lord of the Rings is here in the form of musical theater and, as reported by Yahoo News, the reviews are not good. The Toronto production puts less emphasis on plot, character, and music, and concentrates more on hi-tech theatrics. The production uses a 40-ton, computer controlled stage with 17 elevators and the cast of 55 goes through 500 costumes in the 3 hour performance. Despite this, the same critics say it will be a big money-maker."
It sounds to me that they're trying to cash in on the films, rather than make a fitting tribute to the books themselves...
LOTR has been done in the theater many times before, as an animated series, as various movies and even as video games. ("War in Middle Earth" - [shudder]) Since the original books, the ONLY attempt to repackage the story that hasn't completely sucked was Peter Jackson's movie trilogy. So...this isn't so much "Jumping the Shark" as it is SNAFU.
Why is it so bad as a musical, most of what i remember from the books, that wasn't in the films, were the storytelling...through song and prose. And the summary doesn't mention that some critics, and the granddaughter of JRRT, support the musical and say it is closer to the books than the films.
...despite enjoying the films as standalone lumps of entertainment think that the films jumped the shark first. Dwarf tossing, shield surfing, and various other things that annoy the picky fanboy in me. Don't get me wrong, I love the films, but... dwarf tossing? Seriously, dude!
Game dev and music blog
Tickets Broadway-style musicals often cost upwards of a hundred bucks. When an audience member pays that much money to see a show, they give a standing O at the drop of a hat. They figure it must be a damn fine show; otherwise, why would they have paid so much money? So getting only one standing ovation is the equivalent of a golf clap.
First off, as a Torontian and a lifelong lover of Tolkiens middle earth writings, I'd like to apologise to my fellow Slashdotters for my city hosting this offense-to-art.
One thing people should know is that Toronto's new opera house -- Canada's first dedicated opera house -- is opening next fall. For this debut, the Canadian Opera Company is producing its first complete Ring Cycle. Several prominent Canadian movie directors have been involved in direction (Atom Egoyan, Francois Girard) and the individual performances in years preceeding the cycle's debut have been very well received.
Given the timing, I see this production of LOTR as an attempt to undermine the COC's upcoming prominence. LOTR already has a large mindshare amongst the population in general due to the movies, and it has a RING in it (do not underestimate the mundacity of musical producers marketing skills!). Mirvish's theatres on King St West are facing increasing competition from other fringe theatres, plus movies, plus now a real Opera house in Toronto.
Given these competitive pressures, plus the prevalence of the 'ring' theme in media, the LOTR musical should be seen for what it is -- a market friendly family event @ $120 a ticket. I doubt half of the eventual audience will even know that Tolkien was English or taught at Oxford.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
As a fan since the 70s, I never thought about this until one of my elementary students pointed it out - if the eagles could snatch the heroes off the top of Mt. Doom after all this noise, why couldn't they have simply sent the eagles to drop in the ring? Stick around for the "7th Night Free!" promotion at the Prancing Pony and head home fat and happy.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I no longer get excited when hearing about a new production of the Ring cycle, since I know that the event is usually sold out long before most people hear about it. It seems like the Ring is now being reserved toward the wealthy with connections who can purchase the high-priced tickets a couple of years in advance. I, and I suppose other Wagner fans of limited means, have only the Metropolitan Opera DVD recordings, which are quite good but not a substitute for the actual theatre experience
...when Gandalf whapped Denethor with his staff.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
People almost always miss the plot of LotR entirely. To put it in your own terms,
1. "good guys get ring back from bad guys - 10 Min, tops.
2. good guys find out that using it will destroy everything they hope to preserve - that ought to be good for another 10 min, at least.
3. good guys find they can't just sit on the damned thing and ignore it either - that gives us at least a half hour total.
4. good guys have to destroy ring - Jackson got about 4 hours out of this. Maybe that's excessive, but I'll bet it's worth more than 10 more minutes.
5. Add in a recapitulation of ALL major themes in English Lit from about Beowulf to just before T.S. Eliot - I think we can safely give that at least 1/2 an hour, but yes we could leave that out as re. actual plot - it counts more as what Rand called a Plot/Theme.
6. Plus Aragorn gets to the far side of the board and says "Crown Me!", while the Gondorians argue about whether they should have a king or not - That ought to count as part of your plot somewhere, and be good for at least 10 more minutes.
7. Add in Frodo resists temptation, Golum does too (a bit), both give in before the end, but it works out anyway - I don't see dealing with this in less than 1/2 an hour myself, but maybe.
If the lord of the Rings could be summed up in your plot, all those 900,000 bad generic fantasy novels that tried to imitate it with '"good guys get ring back from bad guys", use it to defeat bad guys, yay!', would all also be great literature. In fact, one of the best proofs that LotR IS literature is the sheer number of people who have written imitations that assume any good guy getting the powerful magic item automatically wins. The best parellel is to those idiots who rewrote Shaxpur's tragedys to give them happy endings.
Who is John Cabal?
I'm getting pretty disgusted with modern theatre. I remember thinking while watching the The Lion King when they came to Los Angeles, "this is all spectacle -- there's no friggin' PLOT." And dare I say it, Phantom of the Opera wasn't much better (and I saw it with Michael Crawford).
Is it too much to ask to have, oh I dunno, maybe a STORY when I go to the theatre? Shakespeare is rolling in his grave at the self-important state of the stage. It's all about the performers instead of the performance.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Tolkien's Frodo: "The Shire!" (stabs Witch King of Angmar)
:O Well, have fun, I'll sit here and knit you a battle standard."
:D:D:D:D
Jackson's Frodo: Ahh! *drops Sting* Don't hurt me, Mr. Nazgul!
Tolkien's Aragorn: *whips out Anduril to old ladies and proclaims himself King*
Jackson's Aragorn: "But I don't want that... I want to.. Sing!"
Tolkien's Faramir: "Not even if I found this thing by the side of the road would I take it!"
Jackson's Faramir: "OMG I r Boromir! Plz to take hobbits to Denethor!"
Tolkien's Arwen: "OMGWTF
Jackson's Xena: YIYIYIYIYIYIYIYIYIYIYI!!!!!!!!!!!!! *dead orcs*
Tolkien's Gimli: *stern glare which gave the RPG community its stereotype for all dwarfs of any sort*
Jackson's Gimli: LOL I AM COMIC RELIEF I AM DUMB
Tolkien's Helm's Deep: There were no elves at Helm's Deep.
Jackson's Helm's Deep: Not only are there elves, but there's a really fat one who ate far too much lembas.
Tolkien's Denethor: Faramir's dead. Shit. Well, the hell with you all, we shall burn like the heathen kings of old.
Jackson's Denethor: Like, oh my god, maybe it's the three buckets of KFC and the bag of weed I smoked, but wouldn't it be cool if Denethor was like, totally XTREME and liked bungee jumping and like, bungee jumped while on fire but forgot his bungee cord?! Totally! Dude! Duuuuude!
Tolkien's Crown of Gondor: Took a bloody entire paragraph, a Tolkien paragraph - not one of your third grade, get out of having too many words paragraphs - to describe.
Jackson's Crown of Gondor: Jackson couldn't even god-damned read, apparently.
Tell me, how did Jackson NOT butcher the master's work? Oh - the books are as they have always been.
If we may not be annoyed at Jackson, then the morons of Slashdot have no cause to be irritated at Microsoft and Shared Source. They have no right to be irritated at, say, the media and its use of the word 'hacker'.
I never could understand this. My wife and I saw Ishtar when it came out, and found it hilariously funny. Casting Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman directly contrary to their "usual" types made it all the funnier. Did most people who saw it not have the intelligence to see that it was all tongue-in-cheek?
Sometimes I really wonder about the comments people make about movies and books.
I've seen a discussion about possible future movie versions of the rest of the Chronicles of Narnia, where somebody said that they need to get rid of all the religious allusions.
I saw a discussion of a science fiction novel by Lois McMaster Bujold (I forget the title right now), whose entire THEME was coincidences and whether they were somehow manifestations of supernatural intervention, whose plot hinged on these coincidences and how unlikely they were, yet how they all fit together, and some bright person commented about how he liked the book, but he felt that it just seemed like too much of a coincidence that (some event) and (some other event) both happened to the same person. Well, DUH!
Along the same line, one of my problems with, say, movie adaptations of books, is that sometimes the screenwriter or director or somebody, I don't know who, don't really understand some aspect of the book. There are some changes that need to be made, because movies do much better at portraying things visually, whereas they are much worse than books at other things. For instance, the air raid scene at the beginning of LWW was excellent, and gave background that would not have been necessary in the book. Gollum was great in LOTR. The ideas were preserved, yet presented in perhaps different forms. There are other changes that seem to be made for dramatic effect, yet seem to betray a lack of understanding of the original: In LOTR, the scene where Faramir is tempted by the ring, yet he resists the temptation, commenting about how Frodo is lucky that he is not that kind of person, gets changed in the movie so that Faramir in fact does NOT resist the temptation, and is only stopped by external events. This makes the whole contrast between the characters of the two brothers not make any sense (as it is no longer a contrast), and it makes their father's different feelings about the two of them not make any sense either. So you end up changing what is both an adventure story and a psychological drama into just an adventure story -- you lose a whole level of meaning, unnecessarily.
I can think of more examples, but I think I'd better stop here. Some of the examples that spring to mind, of people missing the whole POINT of something, would be wildly off topic (although, after all, this IS Slashdot) and/or controversial.