Spamalot and The Light in the Piazza were the big winners at Sunday’s 59th annual Tony Awards. Any early favorites for next year? From April’s Detroit Free Press:
The next big thing in theater, the musical version of “The Lord of the Rings,” is scheduled for its world premiere in 2006 in Toronto. Previews won’t begin until Feb. 2 and the show has yet to be cast but producer Kevin Wallace offered a preview Thursday night to tour operators and other invited guests at the Renaissance Center.
Emphasizing “LOTR’s” human aspects before he mentioned its special effects, Wallace called the show “as powerful and emotional a story as you’ve ever experienced in the theater.”
Some particulars: The show will run 3 1/2 hours, including two intermissions; the music is by Indian composer A.R. Rahman (“Bombay Dreams”) and Finnish folk group Varttina, and there will be Hobbits mingling with playgoers before the show.
Playbill.com recently noted that advance tickets are already being snatched up:
In the first week of sales toward the February 2006 Toronto world premiere of the musical The Lord of the Rings, theatregoers snapped up $7 million (Canadian) in tickets, a spokesperson for the Toronto producers confirmed.
One might cringe imagining a quirky show tune of sweet admonition from Frodo called “Oh, Sam!,” about hobbit pal Sam’s dogged faithfulness. Don’t expect it: Traditional musical theatre is not what India’s most popular composer, A.R. Rahman, and the Finnish group Värttinä, collaborating with Christopher Nightingale, write.
What would the elves sing? What is the sound a hobbit dances to? Can an orc carry a tune?
Expect varied Asian- and European-influenced sounds to suggest the many tribes of the story.
No word yet as to whether or not the Orcs will dance Bollywood style in the background.
I’ve been a big LOTR fan since I was a little kid, reading the Hobbit and the trilogy too. But the point about the orcs brings up something I’ve been uncomfortable with….why is it that all the characters were white? They had enough human diversity for there to be dwarves, elves, hobbits…they even had talking trees for god’s sake…would it be so hard for there to be a brotha (or whatever variety) in all of Middle Earth??
Oh wait…would the orcs qualify as brown? Kind of reminds me of the problems with the mythology surrounding the rakshas…who were most likely just dark skinned South Indians/Dravidians.
Would be interesting to see who gets cast in the play.
No surprises there. The orc facial features are strongly mongoloid. The humans who fight for Sauron (the “Easterlings”) where described as dark-skinned. The good guys were of course from the west of Middle Earth, and pretty white at that. Add to that Tolkien’s strong christian symbology and anti-technological theme, and LoTR seems rather unpalatable.
Don’t you mean:
Singing at the gates of Mordor ^^
?
The latest Black eyed peas (BEP) song “dont phunk with my heart” starts exactly the same way like the song from a Hindi movie Don – “Yeh mera dil pyaar ka deewana”.
Note: The links given do not contain the the beginning of the song from BEP.
I thought the music sounded familiar – they even threw in a a bollywood style “dhiskyaoon” in there somewhere…
good song though.
Considering these stories were created by an Oxford scholar specialising in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse and rather disappointed with the lack of decent ‘English’ mythology, it is not surprising that the main heroic characters are white (regardless of ‘species’)and are from the west and the evil lies in the east and darker skinned people. These were the prevelant ideas of the time when the stories were written, around 1936.
Sadly, things haven’t changed much! – for example the actor John Rhys-Davies’ rant against Muslims.
Dont know if race and ethnicity was Tolkien’s thing. However, he was very pro-environment and anti-industrialism. And this was quite evident throughout the trilogy, but especially in the scene where the trees attacked the evil empire that was taking over their forest.
I havent read the books. But it might have been the director/producer’s innate bias that made the good guys white and bad guys sort of sepia tone.
No, no, that’s not Peter Jackson, who is actually more than sensitive to the aboriginal cause and all that. The books themselves make quite clear the prejudicial presumption on the part of early 20th-century northern Europeans. We don’t know anything about them — we’ll cast them as the bad guys! (Enid Blyton did this too, BTW.)
Funny given that my review of The Two Towers said, “The movie makes me want to have been there as a member of the battle … That would be too unrealistic, given that all of Tolkien’s protagonists look like they emerged fresh from Valhalla. I’d probably have to be fair-skinned, blithe and mystical to make it as a female in this story. That I am decidedly not.”
another good example of why actors should not speak their own minds…
The humans who fight for Sauron (the “Easterlings”) where described as dark-skinned. The good guys were of course from the west of Middle Earth, and pretty white at that. Add to that Tolkien’s strong christian symbology and anti-technological theme, and LoTR seems rather unpalatable.
pardon my my naive, wide-eyed, disgusted perspective, but this is all speculation until someone links evidence that proves it. LoTR seems rather unpalatable to you. i studied english (and children’s lit) in college and i never thought, “oh, those orcs are sepia! the bad guys look asian!” come on. sometimes an orc is just a tortured, ugly elf who works for the dark side. their faces were so mangled, how does that become “mongoloid”? do i have to tilt my head to see it? maybe that’s it. 🙂
does everything have to be about white privilege and deconstructing legitimately good stuff so that we can smugly nod at it, having destroyed it? sheesh. he was a white guy. he wrote white characters. in creative writing, we are constantly told, “write what you know”, because it results in good stuff. are ______ masterpieces full of prejudice because they don’t include other races? no. i think an english guy writing about the characters that he did makes perfect sense– and predictably, his results were wonderful, just like my creative writing prof promised. 😀
as for the christian aspects of it, i’m almost shy to admit that as a christian, i barely was aware of them until my then-bf–who was hindu–pointed them out. what if LoTR does have christian undertones? that doesn’t diminish its beauty in any way. if anything, i like it more.
FINALLY something cool that’s vaguely christian! it’s not like i’m going to read “left behind” while i wait for some rapture that i don’t believe in (not in the way bush and co. do)…the aformentioned ex-bf and several of our friends, none of whom were christian, loved LoTR. i’ve never heard a non-christian discuss how they felt uncomfortable with a part of the trilogy that wasn’t exceptionally in-your-face in the first place, IMO. if you felt that way, fine. you’re my first. 😉
as for the anti-industrial theme, like sonia, i interpreted that as pro-environment. part of my silly christian, white-brainwashed optimisim, no doubt. :p i didn’t mean to rant so much, but i really loved LoTR in a way that i haven’t adored a film since i was back in preschool. i’m all for fighting racism, it’s why i’m so proud to be a mutineer, but i just don’t see it here.
Tolkein came from Birmingham, one of the most heavily industrialised cities in Western Europe. He saw the destruction of much of the countryside and can be forgiven for writing in this vein. However, his ‘anti-technology’ themes were also influenced by the horror of industrial slaughter that he witnessed in the trenches of World War 1, when hundreds of thousands, if not millions of men were blown apart in the first industrial and mechanised war of our time. Large scale, factory killing in the trenches. The sheer horror of this produced fear in Tolkein and inspired him to write a saga that reflected the horror of war. And if he loaded this story with Christian metaphor, so what? And if he wrote it longing for an escape from the horrors and torments of where technolgical advance had taken man, almost to the slaughter of an entire generation and demographic of English youth in one battle alone, the battle of the Somme, can we blame him or his stance? He was a product of his time.
Anyway, mix in Wagner’s Ring Cycle with old Anglo-Saxon and Norse mythology and you come up with Lord of the Rings. I always thought the people who loved it were the biggest nerds, who played Dungeons & Dragons and listened to Iron Maiden.
Nice fight scenes, but I couldnt take those dwarves and hobbits seriously.
Neither did I for the first few times that I read the books.
No, he used non-white characters too. But I doubt that you’ll recall any of their names, since they were doing double-time as cannon fodder, more specifically they were the “enemy”. I am incapable of appreciating a book when the author’s prejudices colour the book. And its not just the LoTR. I cringe whenever Watson says “heathen” in all earnestness. Sadly, I can’t enjoy a good Sherlock Holmes book anymore. 🙁
My bad. Tolkien borrowed heavily from christian mythology while writing the Silmarillion. It was unfortunate that he borrowed so much from existing religious mythology and used it nearly unaltered.
Does pro-environmentalism necessarily imply anti-industrial? Tolkien’s message seems to be that we choose either the environment or industrialism. All in all, the man seems to be longing for the lost days of the middle ages.
It was unfortunate that he borrowed so much from existing religious mythology and used it nearly unaltered.
I’m sorry but I find all this talk of no minority characters in Middle Earth to be pretty lame. All this oversensetiveness calls for Super Jagjit style parody where we re-invent Middle Earth with a cast of minority characters so nobody feels left out. The Shire can have a corner shop run by an Indian if it makes people feel better.
Inspite of the overt Christianity-is-better themes of C.S. Lewis’s books, I love all of them and would recommend them as necessary reading to anyone. So, even if Tolkien had a slight bias, which I mentioned previously was not uncommon in a number of people of that generation, it doesn’t make him a bad person. Take a look at all of the exalted human qualities he wrote about.
Tolkien isn’t that bad, but the Chinese-accented aliens with Fu Manchu moustaches and Asian robes, and the Middle Eastern Watto in Phantom Menace were atrocious.
Anna,
Bah…I f@#ked up the link to the Google Scholar search. Here it is.
in creative writing, we are constantly told, “write what you know”, because it results in good stuff.
I agree with Saurav, I think that it is entirely possible (and in fact probable) that there were racist tendencies to Tolkien’s writing. What if you write what you know, and what you know is racism? Then, your writing will be racist. It’s not a stretch to believe that a person born in South Africa at the end of the 19th century, and growing up in England at the beginning of the 20th, would have prejudice against certain races.
What can I say, Easterlings were dark skinned and rode on oliphaunts and they had their faces painted like a khatakali dancer.
These guys were desi. Period. And Sauron outsourced the Battle of Pelennor Fields to them (but only after they went through a Westron accent training crash course).
For what it’s worth, hobbits are described as being brown skinned in the books, not white.
howdy! anybody saw this pics already?? she looks just perfect, would love to marrie her! 😀