"Fellowship!" the Musical By Lex Louise  [3 more lists]

Some of the best theatre my Chicago-based elitist ass has ever seen.. in LA! Here's why.



1.CAST/CREW. They had fun. It was evident that they enjoyed each other... Obviously they had a blast with the dancery and singery. They 'engaged' the audience, which means the fourth wall (geek term! Look it up) was kicked down with zeal, and often. They improvised like crazy, called out the Lord of the Rings nerds in the crowd (aye, me) and made each other crack up. But not in the embarassing Jimmy Fallon way. The crew worked it. Go Team!



2. INGENUITY. For those of you who have seen the LoTR movies (or god forbid read the books), you can probably understand how impossible it would be to mount anything nearly as epic on stage. HOWEVER, "Fellowship!" used all measure of tricks to successfully imply the scope of Tolkiens work for the Falcon Theatre in Burbank. From the clever use of projections (our map for the journey, Sauron's eye, etc), a very impressive run of blue cloth (Arwen's conjuring of the river to smoke those pesky Nazgûl), and the double/triple/quadruple casting choices added up to awesome.



3. MUSIC. I didn't know this going into the show, but it turns out that the cast improvised the songs over the course of about a year before the production went up. This makes me even happier than I was when I thought Allen Simpson and Joel McCrary wrote it all. Favorites - "One Moment (With You)" and "The Balrog Blues". GOLD!



4. Uh, they're on Facebook.



5. The end of the beginning, yes, was sadly July 12th. However, there is a rumor about the beginning of the middle, which means I'll be putting up a list soon about "Towers!"... and that makes this Ranker very, very happy. Like, snorting and trying not to fart kinda happy.



ww.fellowshipthemusical.com