“With a budget of around £25m, The Lord of the Rings is the most expensive musical ever produced in the West End… The production sports some 500 pieces of armour, 150 weapons and a mind-boggling topiary of hair extensions.” But it isn’t the logistics that make Rings such a daunting production. It’s the reduction of a thousand pages of literature that everyone’s read to a credible few hours in an auditorium.