The West End is set to be rife with orcs as the curtain rises on the lavish stage musical of Lord of the Rings. The show costs a cool £25,000,000 and features a £1,000,000 stage boasting seventeen hydraulic lifts.
The three hour musical previews reportedly had audiences screaming as a thirty foot tarantula squirts ink at the front row and beastly orcs invade the auditorium. Director Mathew Warchus said of the production: “It is a hybrid of Text, Physical Theatre, Music and Spectacle. To read the novel is to experience the events of Middle-earth in the mind’s eye; only in the theatre are we actually plunged into the events as they happen. The environment surrounds us. We participate. We are in Middle-earth.”
