Unlike everyone else in my family, I have not read Lord of the Rings. (Cries of 'Shame, Shame!' to be supplied here).
Not only have I not read it once, I have not read it many, many times.
This is to provide balance to my wife and children who have continually immersed themselves in the world of Middle Earth.
Despite my father's addiction to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which was always on the coffee table in our house beside Scientific American when we were growing up, I never got the fantasy bug.
So it was with some trepidation that I accompanied my wife, a connoisseur of all things Tolkien and Rowling, to the stage version of the epic at the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto Saturday night.
NOTE TO SELF: Each time you make your annual trip to the metropolis to the east, add another 10 minutes of travel time.
Despite leaving 50 minutes before curtain, we didn't make it. This only happens, of course, when you have good seats dead centre in the long, long rows in the front.
The production was a spectacle of the first order, well-acted, beautifully staged and lovingly mounted.
Lots of surprises, the most exciting of which was the literal emergence of a horrid Balrog to take up the entire stage at the end of the first act and blow black gunk at the paying customers.
Michael Therriault, whom I'd seen in a slightly different role as Leo Bloom in Mel Brooks' The Producers in my last trip to Toronto, was deliciously obsequious as Gollum. No matter what else was happening on stage, your eyes were inevitably drawn by the strange, convulsive, quivering shakes and shimmies Therriault used to portray the tormented wretch's psychic struggle.
It's hard to out-act an Oscar-winning computer-generated movie image, but the young Oakville actor managed the trick.
The problems with the production are problems beyond its solution. Despite a three-and-one-half-hour running time, one cannot do justice to the intricacies of such a work. (Despite my own personal failings as a Tolkien reader, I was able to confirm this by speaking to the authority who sat beside me.)
Some characters make cameos that are more mystifying than edifying.
A climatic epic final battle between two vast armies loses something in translation to the stage. Something like scale and impact.
And why would anyone be afraid of the all-powerful Sauron, when he looks suspiciously like a bunch of headlights strung across the back of the stage?
Fortunately, my lack of familiarity with Lord of The Rings allowed me to ignore most of its shortcomings.
I was just too busy being entertained.