Gandalf in Greasepaint

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The hobbits--leprechaunish, with round bellies and bottoms, like the Munchkins in MGM's Oz--are persuasively played by jockey-size actors. The Shire and its environs are suggested less by sets than by delicately sylvan projections. Rivendell's High Elves are just that: they rise and float serenely (on wires) above the hobbits. The Winnebago-size Shelob tries to wrap her spidery tentacles around a struggling Frodo with the help of six black-clad puppeteers.

This LOTR can't match Cirque du Soleil's Las Vegas martial-arts extravaganza Kà for soaring athleticism or technical legerdemain. The visualization of battle scenes is often pedestrian, and toward the end, the choreography makes the Orcs look less like brutal mercenaries than clumsy backup singers. But if the show's ingenuity stumbles now and then, its narrative is always clear and plangent. It locates the melancholy soul at the heart of Tolkien's adventure story.

And what of the music? The first hour suggests an ambitious but conventional musical, with a rousing drinking song and some lovely Elvish ballads that, as one hobbit in the show says, are "like wine for the ears." But as the tale darkens and deepens, LOTR turns into musical drama, with songs replaced by underscoring of the battles. The last real song, and it's a beaut, comes at the end of Act II: Frodo and his friend Sam Gamgee sing in reminiscence of the Shire they love, "Now and for always."

The cast is well led by James Loye as Frodo and Peter Howe as Sam. Brent Carver, a Tony winner for Kiss of the Spider Woman, turns Gandalf into a curious, wispy thing, with eccentric line readings and maundering instead of majesty. But Michael Therriault's Gollum is a sensation. As he hisses, squeals and writhes to express Gollum's two warring psyches (the hobbit he was, the half-life wreck his ring lust has made of him), Therriault gives the most astonishing, show-stealingly schizo performance since Steve Martin's half-man-half-woman in All of Me.

At one point, Bilbo, the hobbit whose accidental custodianship of the ring would lead to the War of Middle-earth, plaintively asks, "Don't adventures ever have an end?" For Wallace, Warchus & Co., the answer is: not this one, not yet. They plan a London opening of LOTR a year from now, then Berlin or Hamburg, perhaps Broadway in 2008. (Contracts that Wallace has signed with his Canadian co-producers require that Toronto be the show's only North American venue for 18 months.) But, McKenna insists, "this isn't a tryout. This is the real thing."

He's right. If this isn't quite the one Ring to rule them all, it's the real Middle-earth deal. Against odds that would make Aragorn wince, the Ring fellowship has staged a definitive megamusical, nearly 350 miles north of Times Square. For now, Broadway is off-Toronto.