Well Gollum-gee!

The other thing that happened in Toronto this weekend, of course, was the opening of the musical stage version of Lord of the Rings.

Most of the critics weren't too kind.

To most arts-people in Toronto, this wasn't really a surprise. After nearly two months of previews, the buzz had been pretty negative.

What gets me, reading between the lines of the various reviews, is how the show failed.

It seems like just about everyone praises the stagecraft. There are rotating stage pieces, big sets, rising and falling platforms -- all manner of excellent hoo-hah and spectacle.

It's just that the songs, and the story weren't very good. A pretty key omission.

Amidst all the outscaled elements, somehow they lost the human (hobbit?) story of Sam and Frodo, and the fellowship, and the quest. The book lurches from place to place without cohesion -- all sturm and drang, no heart.

One of the reviews, and I forget which one described the musical score thusly -- and I'm paraphrasing here: they said it was like someone went into the world music section of a record store and scooped up a bunch of CD's at random.

I was a little worried about exactly that when I heard the four or five names of people who were working on the music. There didn't seem to be any connection or cohesive vision to it. Many of the reviews called out this one, incongruous Celine Dion-like belter, an 11'o'clock number that you know's supposed to be the breakout hit, but which, like most of the show, simply doesn't fit.

What struck me about Lord of the Rings and the reaction to it was that all of this seemed very, very familiar. In the Canadian film and tv industry, we have crews now who've been trained by the golden years of American service productions to be very, very good. The cliche used to be that Canadian shows had a "look" to them, which meant that they looked cheap. But now, if it looks cheap, it's cause not enough money was spent.

If they have the money to spend, Canadian stuff can look beautiful.

But we still have not licked the problem of story. (I know that LOTR is a big UK co-pro, so it's not entirely Canadian, but still, it was birthed here.)

Vision is something that gets talked a lot about here. Telefilm talks about it, CBC Presidents and VPs talk about it. Filmmakers talk about it all the time.

But in another, more real way, vision and story is just the little cat-toy that the fourteen people around the table in the big meeting toss around. People that have vision don't get to see it get to screen supported -- they see it committeed out of them...and people who can talk to Telefilm or please the mandarins get to scoop up money and accolades, even though they miss the point that the real story is about two innocent travellers, and their quest to do the right thing and stay true to themselves and their friendship.

Reading the bad reviews for Lord of the Rings gave me the opposite feeling from schadenfreude. (Is there a word for that? Sympathetic Pain, perhaps? Toxic Empathy?) Toronto desperately needs the tourism injection a long-running show like this would provide. The producers of the show are already saying that the reviews don't matter. I gather Les Miz and many other hit musicals had anemic reviews at first (though they didn't come of age in the blog and net age, when that bad mojo is always just a couple of keystrokes away.)

But the reaction of the producers, and the subtle shift to how they're trying to critic-proof the show now, smacks of something I remember from my theater history.

The shift now is toward describing the show as "a spectacle." It's not a play, it's not a musical...it's a spectacle.

Well. After Shakespeare died, the theater in England generally went out of fashion for awhile. Instead, the courtiers and the wealthy turned back to giant, opulent masques. People would dress up, and recreate a static scene, down to minute detail. And people would ooh and ah and clap. No story. No challenge. No vision. Just...pretty.

Sounds pretty horrible to me.