LOTR Should have studied Marketing

The monstrous Lord of The Rings musical play is grinding to a halt this Fall. After four years of production, this show is calling it quits after just a few months.

When they announced it yesterday, I heard the producers blame everything from SARS, to terrorism, to the rising Canadian dollar, to bad critics, and possibly even to Global Warming!

For true theater fans, LOTR may be too pop-culture or low-brow for them.

This play not only jumped onto the dying end of the LOTR craze, but waited a few more years just to make sure that no one cared anymore.

From what I've seen, the play is more about trying to mimic the movies rather than do some original interpretation of the book. So why would anyone pay $120 to see an adaptation of a DVD they probably own? Besides, there is no way the play can show me giant oliophaunts, flying dragons, or grand landscapes.

The movies took about 12 - 18 hours to tell the story and even then they had to edit out a lot of stuff. There is little wonder about why the 3 hour play was described as confusing and muddled.

Lastly: The idea of blaming critics is alike shooting the messenger. Could it be that the critics were right about the play being bad?

Marketing could have easily predicted this four years ago. Most everyone else did.