Month: March 2006

The new “Lord of the Rings” musical got generally beat up by critics last week. “Most reviewers said the show, which runs to almost four hours, did not live up to expectations. The Toronto Star described it as ‘dull’, while the Toronto Sun said it ‘falls victim to its own hype’. But the granddaughter of author JRR Tolkien praised it for staying true to his classic tale.

“The Lord of the Rings is the most inventively staged show in history — as, indeed, it needed to be. The production’s pyrotechnics make all those gasp-inducing moments from blockbuster shows past seem primitive. That chandelier dropping in Phantom of the Opera? Pshaw. That helicopter landing in Miss Saigon? Ho hum. That revolving stage in Les Misérables? Puh-lease. More than that, these greatest hits of stagecraft seem gimmicky in hindsight. They don’t flow from a coherent vision of the source material in question or bear witness to a singular, original aesthetic — as LOTR’s gobsmacking special effects do.”

“More comic books, more sex. More nonbooks, more gossip. Plenty of facts but no meaning. Sounds like an average day at a 2006 magazine rack, or in cyberspace, or on the couch with television remote in hand. The danger was never really that we would lose access to information; it was that we would lose the ability, or the desire, to make intellectually rigorous use of it.”