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TORONTO - When Toronto impresario David Mirvish built the Princess of Wales theatre more than a decade ago, he thought it could accommodate any kind of show.

After all, it had been especially designed to house Miss Saigon -- a lavish musical whose most memorable setpiece was the landing of a helicopter on stage.

"We built that theatre thinking that with a 60-foot-deep stage, we could do anything," Mirvish laughs. "We thought if we could do Miss Saigon, we'd be OK for anything."

But that was before The Lord of the Rings came along.

When the new musical about the mythic struggle between good and evil has its world premiere March 23, theatregoers will be seeing it on a dramatically rebuilt stage.

"First thing we had to do was take out all the reinforced concrete that was part of the front of our stage. It cost $850,000 just to demolish the stage that we had, so we could put in a new deck for this show that was 40 tonnes of steel. So physically, this was certainly the biggest production we've ever dealt with."

Then, there was the challenge of making the show's hugely complicated designs -- not just Rob Howell's sets but also the otherworldly images and illusions -- work effectively.

Irish producer Kevin Wallace, the key player in the project, has called The Lord of the Rings "a hybrid of text, physical theatre, music and spectacle never before seen on this scale." He has promised that audiences will be taken on a real journey -- "from Rivendell to Mordor" -- and that the Battle of Helm's Deep will be one of the biggest stage sequences in history.

The aim is to astonish and thrill the audience at every turn -- whether with a gigantic spider that takes up the entire Prince of Wales stage or with the menacing Black Riders who are expected to emerge as part man and part horse.

All this explains the challenge faced by Mirvish Productions when it successfully captured the world-premiere run for Toronto.

"In the set itself there are 17 elevators," Mirvish explains. "We've never had so many elevators and revolves in one piece of apparatus. The cost of programming this piece of equipment -- the software -- is a million and a quarter dollars."

Figures like these explain why it's costing $27 million to bring J.R.R. Tolkien's 1,000-page trilogy to the stage. That it's happening in Toronto is due to several factors, but particularly to the commitment of two Torontonians -- Mirvish, the man behind the successful Canadian runs of Les Miserables and Mamma Mia, and Michael Cohl, the savvy tour boss for The Rolling Stones.

"We couldn't do this by ourselves," Mirvish stresses. "Michael was certainly important to us."

Last-minute fine-tuning is continuing on a show that has been in preview for several weeks and stars Brent Carver as Gandalf, James Loye as Frodo and Michael Therriault as Gollum.

Meanwhile, international attention continues to mount. Ticket orders have been pouring in, not just from Canada and the U.S. but from Europe and southeast Asia. By the time previews started in February, advance orders already stood at $16 million.

"That was very encouraging, but not enough to guarantee the success of the show," Mirvish says cautiously. "So we are really very much at the mercy of what people think of us."

Mirvish admits that at the start he was not really a believer because he could not see how The Lord of the Rings could work on stage.

"I'd read the books on my honeymoon back in 1967 and I'd seen the movies -- and I thought it impossible to put this on stage."

At this point, two years ago, he saw himself only as a possible investor in a London production. But he was so lukewarm about the project that when he sent some of his people to England to discuss the show, he asked them to deliver a polite thank you, but no thank you.

"Instead of doing that, they came back to me and said, 'You've got to listen to this piece of music. You can see what's happening as you listen to it.'"

By this time, a creative team in London had already been working on the project for more than two years. So Mirvish listened to some of the score by renowned Indian composer A.R. Rahman and the Finnish group folk group Vartina, and was impressed. He also was told that The Lord of the Rings on stage would be like a combination of Cirque du Soleil and the Royal Shakespeare Company's legendary production of Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby.

"And I thought -- that gets my attention."

Mirvish knew then that he wanted help to bring Frodo's epic journey to the stage.

"It's a great journey, a great story. It's a story that fits our moment because here's someone who's humble and small -- and not the strongest and biggest -- who counts. So the story appealed to me, now that I could see how they'd figured out to tell it."

At this point, London was still seen as the venue for the show's world premiere. The snag was that the only West End theatre with the stage and seating capacity to sustain it was the Dominion on Tottenham Court Road -- and it was unavailable because of the continuing success of the rock musical, We Will Rock You.

It was at this point that Mirvish proposed a Toronto launch. "We knew it couldn't be a pre-Broadway or a pre-London tryout because it was too big to be moved. So you would have to do it here and hope that it would stay here. We had just come off 31/2 years of Lion King and five years of Mamma Mia, so we felt there was an appetite for it. But it would be a little bit breaking the rules because usually shows of this scale always start in New York or London."

Mirvish says the British production team faced a huge decision in deciding to bring The Lord of the Rings to Toronto. But he also knew the show could be an economic shot in the arm for a city still suffering lingering economic fallout from the SARS scare. He decided 14 months ago to give Kevin Wallace and his London colleagues evidence of the Toronto community's commitment to the project.

Mirvish set up special presentations for local power brokers from both the public and private sectors, and got a series of positive responses, Now, Mirvish Productions was ready to make an important commitment -- a commitment to provide 75 per cent of the $27-million budget.

"Usually a show costs $10 million, not $27 million -- so we knew the whole community had to commit to this," Mirvish says.

And that commitment rapidly emerged -- not only in the form of smaller investments but in the Ontario government's decision to invest $3 million and in Tourism Ontario's action in providing an additional $3 million in marketing support. Air Canada became lead sponsor.

Mirvish emphasizes that he is essentially the landlord for the show and that he and Cohl are associate producers.

"Creatively, this is Kevin Wallace's concept and production, done with his team."

But he's still tremendously excited by what's happening.

"It's a strange combination of excitement because I can tell you about all the big things -- and that's great because you need that in large-scale shows. But you also end up crying when a couple of 20-year-olds -- Sam and Frodo -- take you on this journey and move you.

"The tricky thing about being involved with musicals is that if you're a failure you're going to have used up a year and a half to three years of your life. If you're a success, you're going to have to live with these characters for 10 years. So you want to find a musical with characters you like and something you feel really good about. And this is a great story."

Ticket information for The Lord of the Rings is available by calling 1-800-461-3333 or by visiting the website www.lotr.com.

Jude wrote:

Here's a mostly positive review from the Daily Telegraph