The Lord of the Rings – the wigs

Well, The Lord of the Rings didn’t open last night and so it’s not a review that takes up page 3 of today’s Evening Standard although the online version does contain “The+Lord+Of+The+Rings/showReview” in its address. Cake, having, eating, anyway…

Last night was the first preview of The Lord of the Rings and under the gentleman’s agreement (which clearly does not apply to the Whingers in any respect) the newspapers can only say nice things (or nothing, or puff) about things they see before opening night.

But you can still read between many of the lines.

In Good Lord, it’s the Orcs Jack Lefley heaps plentiful praise on the rotating floor which must be a relief to the producers as it means that at least that £1million was well spent. Where did the other £24 million go? Difficult to tell from the review.

Of the music (and it is a musical, so this is pretty important really) he says:

The musical score is an unusual collaboration between contemporary Indian composer AR Rahman – who wrote the music for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bombay Dreams – and Finnish folk music group Varttina.

Don’t you love it when a sentence only contains one non-factual adjective and it’s “unusual”?

But what really caught our attention was this:

The enemies of the hobbits proved terrifying when they left the stage during the interval to get up close to the audience at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

Several women ran for the exits screaming as the black-clad creatures ran through the building.

Now call us cynical but we’re immediately reminded of the genius marketing of American schlock-meister William Castle whose gimmicks included issuing “Death by Fright” insurance policies in the lobby and would often have an actress dressed like a nurse on duty in order to convince punters that the movie was seriously scary.

However, both Whingers are fully expecting to run screaming from the theatre during the first few bars of the “unusual” music.

In the hope of receiving a few more crumbs from the overladen table that is The Lord of the Rings, we are sending one of our agents along this evening. We could just go ourselves of course, but the anticipation is just sooooo delicious. In fact, we many never go.

Oh yes, and the wigs. This is hysterical.