"Lord of the Rings" in Toronto -- Early Buzz Good

The Globe and Mail was at the first previews. Technical glitches, long breaks, 5 hours long (including extended breaks) and it all sounds promising.

The gnarled forests of Middle Earth thrust out to embrace the audience. The automated, cantilevered stage turns, twists, rises, falls and tilts in myriad and extraordinary ways -- at one moment, a winding forest path, the next, a soaring battlefield promontory, while wind and smoke swirl through the auditorium. Menacing orcs leap and tumble like pre-historic Raptors. A dozen Ents --14-feet-high humanoid trees (actors on stilts) -- conduct a council of the forest. The music -- jointly composed by the Finnish folk ensemble Varttina and India's A.R. Rahman -- owes more to opera than musical theatre, an almost continuous score that includes lush ballads, a rollicking drinking number (at the Prancing Pony Inn), a powerful anthem song, as well as the stirring, discordant strains of the battlefield.

As a man who seriously considered just catching a flight to New Zealand trying to get work on the film trilogy in any way possible, I am seriously geeking out with excitement here.