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reallyhardy · 6 months

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louis maskell as frodo baggins & nuwan hugh perera as samwise gamgee in the lord of the rings: a musical tale.

#LOTR musical #lord of the rings musical #the lord of the rings: a musical tale #frodo baggins #samwise gamgee #louis maskell #nuwan hugh perera #gifs by me #AWOOOOOO i miss them #also it's literally so hard to make gifsets from a production with like. 3 show clips and a dream #thanks audience videos from instagram and youtube.

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reallyhardydraws · 9 months

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last bit of LOTR musicalposting from me tonight - sam & frodo, as played by the lovely nuwan hugh perera & louis maskell. HOW lucky am i that i got to see two of my UK theatre faves in one of my most very favourite musicals that i thought would never be staged again???

anyway, the road goes on. ever, ever on.

🌟links to support the artist!🌟

#LOTR musical #samwise gamgee #frodo baggins #nuwan hugh perera #louis maskell #draws #oh i hope to do SO much more fanart this month #no commissions because i've got my summer work at the gallery!#so hopefully in the evenings i can get to some fanart. LOTR musical has me in an absolute chokehold rn

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lordoftheringsmusical · 7 months

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Newly released pictures of the Hobbits from The Lord of the Rings: A Musical Tale 🌻

📸 Pamela Raith, published by Anjali Mehra

#lord of the rings musical #lotr musical #watermill theatre #sam #nuwan hugh perera #rosie #charlotte grayson #frodo #louis maskell #pippin #amelia gabriel #merry #geraint downing #news #photos

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ta-divchyna · 6 months

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Louis Maskell as Frodo | The Lord of the Rings at The Watermill Theatre

#musicals #lord of the rings #louis maskell #just look at him #oh my god

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unsightlythinker · 20 days

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Thinking about this performance again…

Oh, I miss them so very much.

youtube

…

These were my immediate thoughts after seeing the show:

(And I still don’t think that I’ve fully recovered from the whole ordeal-)

#lotr #the lord of the rings #lotr musical #lord of the rings musical #the lord of the rings: a musical tale #frodo baggins #samwise gamgee #louis maskell #nuwan hugh perera #a. r. rahman #christopher nightingale #musicals #musical theatre #yes. yes. I know #I was fangirling HARD #(I still stand by everything that I said)#Youtube

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nowandforalways · 8 months

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I'm absolutely in love with this picture from the Watermill Theatre's twitter:

And there are many reasons, but one of the biggest ones is this:

"Alright, the hobbits are responsible for a lot of music in this show, and it would be nice if they could be playing and singing at the same time. So we've got Nuwan on guitar, Geraint on cello, and Amelia on a seemingly infinite number of random instruments - Louis, do you play any instruments that are portable? And that you can sing and play at the same time? No? Okay...just, ah....just hit this bottle with a fork I guess?"

#lotr musical #louis maskell #i realize that probably Frodo is left out of the instrumentalists for plot-related reasons #maybe Louis and his Real Legs are doing things that would make it difficult to have an instrument on his person at all times #but my hypothetical scenario is funnier so i'm going with it #thank you and heyday #hehehe

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mischieffoal · 7 months

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Frodo 2023 LotR Musical references

I've been collecting reference images of lots of the cast and characters for my own art, so I thought I'd just share them collected here as well so others don't have to slog through the Instagram and crop images and screenshot videos etc. These are all from the Watermill Theatre Instagram/website/reviews, with most photos credited to Pamela Raith.

This time it's Frodo/Louis Maskell:

I'll put them all in #lotr 2023 references

#lotr 2023 references #lotrm #lord of the rings #lord of the rings musical #tolkien #frodo baggins #louis maskell

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bombegranate-art · 1 year

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Grinpayne from the musical, The Grinning Man. Drawn in 2019. Marker on sketch paper.

#the grinning man #grinpayne #louis maskell #musical #musical theater #portrait #micron #tombow #prismacolor

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misssas · 8 months

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I could cry!

#Lord of the rings musical #lotr musical #the lord of the rings musical 2023 #the watermill theatre #louis maskell #Nuwan Hugh Perera

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noughticalcrossings · 7 months

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The Light of Eärendil

Inktober day 2. Spider

The Watermill Theatre production of the Lord of the Rings musical was spectacular, I have little else to add

#lord of the rings #shelob #frodo baggins #samwise gamgee #my art #also shoutout to Nuwan Hugh Perera for lifting Louis Maskell over his head #there was at least half a foot of height difference in there

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reallyhardy · 6 months

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"you have so much to enjoy, and be, and do."

"i thought we'd do it together."

the lord of the rings: a musical tale at the watermill theatre, 2023.

bonus:

#LOTR musical #the lord of the rings: a musical tale #the lord of the rings #gifs by me #theatreedit #lmao everybody say thank you andrew howells on youtube for this #this isn't a full video boot! just a clip from the ending. link to the vid in notes!#louis maskell #nuwan hugh perera

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burning--heart · 4 months

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The Grinning Man is Not a Horror Show

this post brought to you by: my own personal experience trying to show this musical to people (which i have already talked about briefly) and also this post by castledock:

the mainstream media’s perception of LHQR is almost always “well I haven’t watched or read it but this guy looks scary so it must be a very disturbing and scary book/movie” and every time I go outside of my little circle of LHQR Appreciators it’s like being slapped in the face by Ableism

i’m spinning this off into my own post because the essay got Long and also it’s definitely about tgm and not lhqr. strap in y’all.

like, ok. you see the pictures online. the protagonist has a bloody bandage on his face, the lighting is moody, and the puppets are creepy i guess (but they are so charming once you see them in motion)…

i’ll be focusing on flesh-and-blood adult grinpayne and his face. does it cause him a lot of grief? yes. is it central to the show? absolutely. but are you meant to be scared or disturbed by it? no. if you were, then yeah. this would be a horror show, and a bitingly ableist one at that. but it’s not.

there is one single moment where we are made to see grinpayne’s face as horrifying, and even then it's... well. it’s not about his smile being grotesque. not really.

it happens when his frustration at being kept as a spectacle because of his face reaches a tipping point. he bites back. "i'm the stuff of your nightmares," he says, "i am the freak show! watch me smile!" it's not an empowering moment. he is gutting himself for his audience.

He removes his bandages and reveals his jaw - a huge nightmarish bloody grin. Horribly unhealed. Red. Raw. Glistening. It's there, and then it's gone. “Laughter" riff crashes in and the world tilts.

Above is the stage direction from the script. Note that the “Laughter” motif is identified by name.

We can see how this was executed onstage in Bristol: The reveal is accompanied by sickly green strobe light, Louis Maskell as Grinpayne snaps his head to the side, there's a brief blackout, we are jumpscared by a giant grinpayne puppet head in the same green strobe, blackout again, then it’s on to the characters' reactions.

It sounds horror on paper. it looks very horror in Bristol. and yet the characters react as though they've just seen heaven. what's up with that?

here lies one of the biggest challenges the grinning man has: its empathetic theme gets easily muddied by the reactions the other characters have to grinpayne. generally, when experiencing a story, we look to the characters within it for cues on how we should feel about its topics, and they guide us through it. this is especially true of media aimed at children. the grinning man is... not like that. the royals and the people of the fair see his face and they are instantly enlightened! with sudden clarity, you're him, and he is you!

the audience doesn’t get it.

but i don't think we're supposed to.

Song lyrics like ‘you realise that you are him and he is you’ explain to us Grinpayne’s effect on his audiences, but we are never shown that experience nor are we invited to feel that experience ourselves. (Brendan Macdonald, Exeunt)

this reviewer was close, very close, but has jumped to conclusions and ended up shutting the door on the idea that makes the musical make sense. its true that we are told how the other characters see grinpayne, and we don't get to experience that for ourselves. but the thing is, while we are told one thing, we are actually being shown something entirely different.

characters in his audience look at grinpayne and we are told they have an earth-shattering revelation. we hear them explain it multiple times. despite this, their reaction is not what we feel. this is the part that's unintuitive.

here’s where we circle back to the face reveal. the dramatic imagery clashes with what the fictional audience is seeing and feeling. this is because we, the non-fictional audience, are not supposed to be putting ourselves in their shoes at all. the character we’re anchored to is grinpayne. and to him, this is not a triumph of self-discovery. the horror isn’t in his appearance, it’s in how people treat him because of it.

and when it comes to the characters’ revelations, it’s not really about grinpayne anyway. it’s about themselves and what they project onto him, whatever that is. grinpayne is a symbol to almost everyone, whether they see him as a gruesome face, a lord, or a god. they don't understand him when they look at his face.

the audience of the grinning man, unlike the characters within it, are provided the opportunity to connect with grinpayne on a deeper level. we get to dive into his head like nobody else. this is why “Labyrinth” is a big deal (this is also why them changing over half the lyrics to this song at the transfer is a big deal). this is why dea’s love for him is a big deal: she sees him for who he is, and has from the start.

we also get to see the “real” grinpayne (and even love him for who he is), but unlike the characters’ sudden (and shallow) enlightenment, our understanding of grinpayne is gradual, but truer because of it. it builds slowly and perhaps unnoticed throughout the show until you’re fully immersed; it’s something that you feel, not think. though, if i had to pick a moment, personally, it would be “when they are gazing at my grin / what is it that they see within?” from “Labyrinth” because that line knocks me on my ass to this day.

and. surprise! this deeper understanding is also why i think this show is a musical and not a straight play. nothing has the emotional capacity that music does. we aren’t just told the way grinpayne feels; his songs allow us to feel with him in a way that spoken word never could. that’s how we connect.

at the end of the day, this guy still has a bloody face. and some people are going to see this and assume that tgm is horror. but hopefully if they watched it they’d change their minds, because the grinning man shows us the most (and only truly) disturbing thing about grinpayne’s injury is the cruelty and misunderstanding he faces at the hands of a miserable world where “laughter is the best medicine.” and “I Am the Freak Show” may contain the moment with the strongest “horror” visuals in the show, at least in the original production, but it’s actually a crucial example of why tgm itself is not a horror show itself.

#the grinning man #grinpayne #burning thoughts #this is over 1k words btw #thanks for reading if you made it this far #also i specify bristol in this post not to differentiate it from london but to differentiate it from the script #aka everything brought onstage that is not present in the text. this is not a version differences post #also i didn’t want to mention it in the post since i don’t feel like digging for the source and it’s not super relevant to my point #but louis maskell Has said that “i am the freak show” is the most difficult and emotionally taxing part of the show for him to perform.#and no fucking wonder honestly. have you seen this guy’s energy during this number? it’s unbelievable.#peace and love. hope i made sense. goodnight <3

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lordoftheringsmusical · 9 months

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