Lord of the Rings Musical Opens

The curtain rose in Toronto last night on an epic musical adaptation of the Lord of the Rings that has taken four years to produce, features 55 actors, 500 pieces of armour and 17 elevators, and cost about $27m (£15.5m) - making it almost certainly the most expensive stage production in history.

"I have butterflies in my stomach, but at least they're all flying in formation," David Mirvish, the executive producer of the show, told the Guardian hours before the first official performance. He had originally thought that staging JRR Tolkien's three-volume novel was impossible, but he said the London team who had been developing it for several years convinced him otherwise.

"We were promised that the show would not be a conventional musical," he said. "We were promised it wouldn't have singing and dancing hobbits, and one song after another, and that it would not exceed a certain time length." However, at more than three hours long, the production, above, is still a marathon.

The creative team behind the project is headed by British director Matthew Warchus and Irish producer Kevin Wallace, who previously worked with Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Theatre Company. The actor playing the lead role of Frodo Baggins, 26-year-old James Loye, is also British. But only one London theatre, the Dominion on Tottenham Court Road, would have been technically capable of staging the show and it was already booked with performances of the Queen musical, We Will Rock You.

Instead, Mirvish's company have brought it to Toronto's Princess of Wales theatre, designed to stage Miss Saigon in which a helicopter lands on stage. But even that space had to be adapted to accommodate a 40-tonne computer-controlled floor. "All the money, tricks and toys - they're wonderful, but they don't mean a thing if we don't feel something about these hobbits," said Mirvish. "So now we've spent the piggy-bank, and we're waiting to hear the world tell us what they think of us."

One report claimed that $16m had already been received in advance ticket sales some weeks ago, but if the producers were hoping for critical plaudits, too, they could be disappointed. One theatre writer who has seen the production said the consensus among Canadian and US critics was not positive.

"The general feeling is that the spectacle overwhelms the story, and that the hybrid musical/non-musical doesn't really work," said the critic, who did not want to be named before reviews had been published. "It's not that three-and-a-half hours is too long - some of us are used to sitting through Wagner. It's that it isn't enough time to tell the story. Even Peter Jackson needed nine hours of movie time."