Lord of the Rings musical closing this July

[davem]

Originally Posted by Sauron the White

I mentioned the length of the books and the films to show that the length of a 3 hour play based on such material was going to have its serious drawbacks. .

But the point of the argument that books & movies are different is that inevitably things must be changed or omitted in the translation of one into the other. The question is whether in that translation the spirit of the work is communicated, & it hardly matters whether the film is two hours long, or ten, or a thousand. You, I think, would be the first to acknowledge that a massive amount of the book has been lost in the translation to film. I suspect that if the script of the movies was published, including 'stage directions' (or whatever the film equivalent is) the text would run to probably a couple of hundred pages compared to the 1100 pps Tolkien wrote.

The question here is whether, despite the cuts & changes made, the spirit of the book came across. I don't know. I liked the music, & some of it I think is beautiful, but I'd have to see the show to know whether it captures the spirit of the book. The point is, I don't rule out the possibility that it could capture & communicate the spirit of Tolkien's story simply because it is only three hours (or whatever) long.