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davem ... I will be very honest and frank with you here. In the last few years I have heard many people bring up "the spirit of the book". I am sure that they know what that means to them. I find it difficult to impossible to discuss if anything is faithful to the "spirit of the book" because that is an impossible thing for me to quantify or measure or evaluate based on what it means to you.
My point about length is that making a three hour play about something which cannot possible be done in that length of time is simply a bad idea on its face. I would have no problem if they decided to dramatise a smaller portion of the larger tale, but it was folly to take something that long and make it that short. A seven foot two man cannot wear a suit made for a man five feet six inches tall. The tailor may have used quality materials and a great deal of his skill and craftsmanship. The color may have been matched beautifully to the wearer. But its simply the wrong length to cover the subject properly.
In this case, the length is a very germaine criticism of the play as a medium in and of itself because it forced lines to be delivered at breakneck speed, forced complicated and lengthy expository and historical explainations to be shoved at the audience with no time at all for consideration, and completely elminated altogether the idea of the pause, restful consideration, or poignant break to let things settle in.
That was a function of the director who simply had too much on his plate, could not pare it any further, and thus decided to pace the entire thing much to fast. Were that not bad enough, the time that could have been used for better things was wasted on music that added nothing to the storyline.
Lets compare apples to apples. Listen to the music from most Andrew Lloyd Webber plays and examine the role of the music in the play. It is vital and important and helps advance the storyline completely. The opposite was true in the LOTR musical. Whatthe heck did all that Cirque Soliel wailing do to advance anything in the play? The composers could have learned something from other play musicals.
But that was but one of my objections. All of my comments were directed to the failure of the play as a musical play. I made no other comparison or evaluations to the books or the movie or the radio-play for that matter (and how long did that take speaking of proper length to cover the subject?).
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