Giant Spider

I went to see Lord Of the Rings the musical on Saturday. I don't think I would have made the effort to organise tickets myself, but my brother and his girlfriend were going so i thought i would go along and have a look. I am a big fan of the book. I thought the films were quite good although they annoyed me with the unnecessary changes in the story. It is obviously a big ask to fit 3 books and an interval in to 3 hours but they have done it pretty much as well as it could be done. I think it might be totally incomprehensible if you hadn't seen the films or read the book though. The songs weren't particularly memorable but they were entertaining enough and there weren't too many of them. The real strength of the show was how good it all looked. The many sectioned moving stage worked well, Shelob was an impressively big spider and the highlight was the disappearance of Bilbo at the beginning. They dimmed the lights on him as he put on the ring but you could still see his outline. Rather that walking off the set in the dark, he actually appeared to disappear. It was very good.

My favorite part of the performance was just before the brief second interval though. Whilst they presumably did some sort of set change on the stage, they sent out some of the people dressed as orcs in to the crowd to scare us while we waited. One of these people was getting in to position during the 2nd act and scared some woman so much that she screamed and shouted "Fucking hell" very loudly to my amusement.