Word: warchus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...weekend in an English country house from three vantage points - dining room, sitting room and garden. It is packed with laughs, brimming with stage tomfoolery (a character who leaves the dining room in one play shows up in the sitting room in the next) and staged superbly by Matthew Warchus, in a production first seen at London's Old Vic Theatre. (Richard Zoglin picks the 10 Ayckbourn plays that deserve revivals...
...point, Bilbo, the hobbit whose accidental custodianship of the ring would stoke the War of Middle-earth, plaintively asks, "Don't adventures ever have an end?" For Wallace, Warchus & Co., the answer is: not this one, not yet. Rather than a brisk, there-and-back-again jaunt, they are in the middle of a marathon. "Hopefully," says McKenna, "by the time we finish here, we'll have a very sound blueprint of the show we're going to do in London." They plan a West End opening of LOTR a year from now, then Hamburg or Berlin, perhaps Broadway...
...occurs to you that the idea is mad, you aren't the first. "I thought it was foolish," said director Matthew Warchus. He believed it would be "instantly plausible" to do the Ring as a spoof. "It's such an earnest story, and people are so protective of it." Still, he signed on. Then he and musical supervisor Christopher Nightingale chose to break with the Broadway songwriting style and go for an ethereal, world-music sound. Two sounds, in fact: one from A.R. Rahman, the best-selling composer of Indian musical films; the other from the Finnish group Värttin?...
...point, Bilbo, the hobbit whose accidental custodianship of the ring would lead to the War of Middle-earth, plaintively asks, "Don't adventures ever have an end?" For Wallace, Warchus & Co., the answer is: not this one, not yet. They plan a London opening of LOTR a year from now, then Berlin or Hamburg, perhaps Broadway in 2008. (Contracts that Wallace has signed with his Canadian co-producers require that Toronto be the show's only North American venue for 18 months.) But, McKenna insists, "this isn't a tryout. This is the real thing...
...could have been a mix of the amateur ABBA show "Mamma Mia" and London's longest-running bad musical, "Blood Brothers" (15 years and it hasn't had the grace to close). But the Tim Firth book weaves the songs smartly around a cleverly developed situation, and director Matthew Warchus moves the dense human traffic with lightning precision. Even the dancing's good. Run - fly - to London before the show, which won the Olivier Award for Best Musical, closes. You have two weeks...