The Lord of the Rings - the musical...

...was long. 7:30-11:00. Great for keeping us going and forcing the last of the jet lag from us. Not so great if you were looking for an inspiring piece of theatre which conveyed the epic scale and ever changing emotions of Tolkein's masterwork. I had assumed that in trying to do in three and a half hours what even the films had taken nine hours to do, they would just pick out particularly telling episodes from the story and provide some sort of linking narrative. But no, although some bits of the story were missing, we essentially got the whole thing, and so all the characters (even FRodo and Sam) were cardboard cutouts, the dialog consisted on the whole of someone telling someone else either what had happened or what was going to happen. The performances couldn't help but be wooden. You didn't feel involved at all.

The effects were pretty spectacular, to be sure, some of the numbers (particularly those for the hobbits) were catchy, and it didn't really drag until the final half hour or so, but overall this didn't do Tolkein's epic justice.

That said, we enjoyed it (in perhaps a rather superior way) and didn't feel disappointed because the reviews which we'd read at home when it had opened here had been patchy. Their general tenor had been "full marks for even trying". And that seems fair, if patronising.

We avoided the thunderstorm and we kept awake too!