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‘Lord of Rings’ to close after lukewarm reviews in London

LONDON – The lavish stage musical “The Lord of the Rings” will close July 19, 13 months after opening to lukewarm reviews.

Producers announced Friday that the show, based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy saga, will close after 492 performances at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. With a budget of $24 million, “The Lord of the Rings” is one of the most expensive musicals ever produced.

It had its world premiere in Toronto in March 2006, but closed six months later. It was trimmed and reworked for its London run, but still failed to impress some critics.

While a year is a respectable run, the show’s predecessor at the Theatre Royal, “The Producers,” ran for twice as long.

Producers said talks were under way to take the show to Germany with a German-speaking cast. A touring version is being developed to open in New Zealand next year before going to Australia and east Asia.

Citizen Online Archive, 2006-2009

This archive contains all the stories that appeared on the Tucson Citizen's website from mid-2006 to June 1, 2009.

In 2010, a power surge fried a server that contained all of videos linked to dozens of stories in this archive. Also, a server that contained all of the databases for dozens of stories was accidentally erased, so all of those links are broken as well. However, all of the text and photos that accompanied some stories have been preserved.

For all of the stories that were archived by the Tucson Citizen newspaper's library in a digital archive between 1993 and 2009, go to Morgue Part 2

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