“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.”
I won’t bury the lede. There’s not much time. You need to hurry up and get your tickets!
The Lord of the Rings – The Fellowship of the Ring – 25th Anniversary – In Concert at the Auditorium Theatre is extraordinary.
If you already have your tickets, well done. If you’re looking for a little reinforcement, someone to tell you that you’ve spent your hard-earned money well and will enjoy your precious time on Saturday at 2 pm or 7:30 pm at the Auditorium Theatre, you most certainly have, and you most certainly will.
If you haven’t gotten your tickets yet, and you’re a Lord of the Rings fan, well…
Let’s go on an epic (though not actually epic, since I’m just typing and you’re just reading) quest to describe the indescribable.
Think of your favorite epic movie adjective… Spectacular, immersive, transcendent, transportive… I like transportive, but all of them apply.
The movie’s amazing, of course, but watching the film on a sixty-foot screen as an orchestra and chorus perform one of the greatest scores in the history of cinema? Unforgettable.
First, let’s set the stage. One gorgeous, historic theatre. One massive screen. 238 musicians, including a symphony orchestra, chorus, and soloists.
Conducted by Maestro Ben Phelps and featuring soloist Imogen Parry, the FILMharmonique Orchestra and Uniting Voices Choruses perform Howard Shore’s magnificent score with extraordinary precision, reminding us how powerfully the music shapes the film’s drama and momentum.
Next, the story. With a little help from their friends in the Fellowship, Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee go on a quest to take the One Ring to Mordor to destroy it, once and for all, and, well, Sauron and Orcs, and you know the rest… The Lord of the Rings is the premier epic fantasy tale of all time–probably the most important and influential story in the history of the genre.
Finally, the feelings. There are many of us, millions of us – including Stephen Colbert, Sir Christopher Lee, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Barack Obama, and Pope Francis, to name a few of the more famous folks in our tribe – whose lives have been beyond enriched by The Lord of the Rings. It has served as our entry point into fantasy. We read The Hobbit when we were young enough to still be afraid of dragons. We forged into, and never really left, J.R.R. Tolkien’s more than 1,200-page trilogy. We learned a few words of Elvish: Pedo mellon a minno, ‘Speak, friend, and enter.’ We cherished or skipped the Dwarvish songs. Either way works. We even read, tried to read, or pretended to have read The Silmarillion.
When I was a kid, I read The Hobbit under my blanket with a flashlight. I was supposed to be asleep. I started reading the trilogy in a laundromat in college when I had no earthly idea what life had in store for me. I went and saw The Fellowship of the Ring in a Brew ’n View in Portland, Oregon, on the night it opened in theaters. Still, no idea. When I was a new(ish) dad, I watched the films with my son and then with my daughters the second they were old enough.
And I’m not alone. For so many fans, writers, and artists, The Lord of the Rings is the foundation for how we think about and tell stories. We anxiously awaited and forever debated the Peter Jackson films, watching them over and over in theaters, and living rooms, and in friends’ basements, on big screens and small screens and flat screens, on DVD, then streaming. We watched them with our kids, and then went out and bought them the books, even though we weren’t really sure when they would be old enough to read them. It’s our North Star, our lodestar, our touchstone, our lighthouse. It’s not how we view the world. It is a world.
So when something like the 25th anniversary of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first chapter of the trilogy, comes to town with a symphony orchestra playing along, it’s a dream come true. A new wrinkle. It’s our next chapter.
Ultimately, what makes this production a “must-see” is the communal joy of it. This is a love letter to Tolkien fans, a riveting, rollicking, poignant celebration of the story that defined a genre and our generation. It transports us back to when we first read Tolkien’s stories, to when we first saw Peter Jackson’s films, to when we watched the trilogy with our children.
See? Transportive.
The Fellowship of the Ring — In Concert reminds us why we gather in theaters in the first place, to be swept away, to cheer for Frodo and Sam, and to discover that even in the darkest shadows, the music still carries us forward.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring — In Concert runs through Saturday, March 15, with performances at 2 PM and 7:30 PM at The Auditorium Theatre, 50 East Ida B. Wells Drive, Chicago, IL. You can get tickets here. For more Chicago reviews or show information, see chicagoonstage.com or theatreinchicago.com.