From Toronto Star
Christopher Nightingale is the orchestrator and musical supervisor of the $27-million stage adaptation of The Lord of the Rings currently holding auditions in Toronto, and there's one thing he wants to make perfectly clear.
"I definitely wouldn't describe it as a musical."
That's despite the fact this epic production is going to require two composers, 18 musicians, a singing company of 51 and — in Nightingale's own words — "there are very few moments in the show when music isn't playing."
"Tolkien's original book is packed with music," he continues. "The question isn't how do you do the story with music, but how do you do it without?"
But it won't be a conventional piece of musical theatre by any stretch of imagination, a fact Nightingale is eager to convey with the comforting news that "Frodo won't be singing a big ballad about how heavy the ring is and he can't go on."
As he describes things we're not going to find in the show, there's an impish grin on the 39-year-old's face that would make him good casting for Samwise, but don't be deceived.
This Cambridge-educated veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company has the same intellectual rigour that executive producer Kevin Wallace seems to have insisted on as a job requirement for anyone working on this project.
Nightingale admits that both he and director Matthew Warchus shared a certain amount of trepidation about signing on for the seemingly impossible task of bringing one of the most beloved works of modern literature to the musical stage.
"Initially, we were all a little bit doubtful about whether or not this could be done," he confides. We asked each other if there was a way of doing the story, musically, that wasn't embarrassing, but honest to the book and its emotion."
So they began by deciding what the music for this project wouldn't be like.
"Not a relative of Les Misérables," announces Nightingale confidently. "Certainly not Rodgers & Hammerstein or even Stephen Sondheim."
But having eliminated all those options, they discovered that "we had to go to an extreme the other way before we could find a way in."
And then, strange as it may seem, they found it in a relatively obscure piece of music theatre written by Tom Waits.
Although it has nothing to do with The Lord of the Rings, it bore the eerily appropriate title of The Black Rider.
Waits wrote the work for avant-garde director Robert Wilson in collaboration with beat novelist William Burroughs and it premiered in Hamburg in 1990.
Nightingale and Warchus found it "very experimental and very creepy."
That appealed to the duo because their biggest concern in coming up with a musical concept was how to define the dark side.
"That's the big elephant trap because you don't want any of that scary movie dum-de-dum-dum sort of stuff."
What they found in Waits was "an Eastern European quality, strange and seemingly beautiful but also slightly off-centre. We heard it and we said, `That's the way, that's the door.'"
Although Waits had pointed the way, they felt they needed something with a more primal quality to deal with Tolkien's mythic world.
And their search led them to the Finnish contemporary folk-roots music group Värttinä.
Nightingale recalls hearing one of their songs about a woman slowly going crazy in a forest after being bitten by a snake.
"It was extraordinary. Demonic and abrasive but fascinating." Although Värttinä's sound is perfect for certain elements of The Lord of the Rings, Nightingale sensed that an additional quality was needed and he found it at his fingertips.
Nightingale was working as musical supervisor for the London production of Bombay Dreams and he became drawn to the music of the show's composer, A.R. Rahman.
"With Värttinä, we had a brittle, Nordic sort of feel, but Rahman allows us to tap into the East, with an exoticism full of long lines and a luxuriant atmosphere about it."
When asked to pinpoint the most engaging quality of Rahman's music, Nightingale says: "There's a passion about it. It comes absolutely from his soul. Rahman won't write anything unless he feels spiritually right about it. Speaking in elemental terms, he's the air.
"Värttinä has different motivating urges. They're the earth." And almost as if anticipating the next question, Nightingale volunteers, "They both do the fire."
The logical assumption might be that each composer provides material for different types of characters — Värttinä for the hobbits, Rahman for the elves — and Nightingale agrees that has happened, but "purely by accident. It wasn't a conventional choice."
In fact, on some material, the two wildly different composers wound up working together.
"There's one piece early in the show," explains Nightingale, "called `The Journey Song.' It had to reflect the wide-eyed naiveté of the hobbits, but yet offer us an other-worldly feeling as well. We took a melody that Rahman had written and Värttinä applied their own particular take on it. The result is magical."
When asked how two such disparate styles can be married in one song, Nightingale grins self-effacingly. "I guess you could say that I'm the glue."
It sounds like he's providing a fair bit of adhesive action on the project, because he describes the team's goal as "wanting to create some kind of common ethnicity so that the hugeness of the world could be described. There's nothing you will hear that's out of place, but yet you can't put your finger precisely on any point of origin."
Obviously actors don't audition for a work like this with conventional Broadway songs, and Nightingale shares that "we've been hearing a lot of Newfoundland-based tunes. When we want to hear what people sound like we try them out on Finnish folk pieces or even some gypsy chants."
And just like Frodo and Sam, the show's music goes on a considerable journey as well. "It starts out very small, very primitive, but as it progresses, it grows much more complex. By the time you get to the final battle, the apocalypse, it should be absolutely awe-inspiring and frightening, using everything available to us."
For a moment, Nightingale seems overwhelmed by the task, but remembers a thought that centres him.
"The music is already all there in the book. Our job is to translate it onto the stage. It's Tolkien's cues but our interpretation."