LONDON -- Seldom has a play left the colonies with such rancor as The Lord of the Rings.

A year ago June 28, the $28-million mega-musical announced the close of its Toronto world-premiere production at the Princess of Wales Theatre. At the news conference, producer Kevin Wallace not only blamed the critics for the musical's mediocre ticket sales, but named names.

That was then, and this is now. A year after Wallace's rant, J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth is reborn in a slightly more intimate Royal Drury Lane Theatre, with little sense of second-hand hobbitry. Indeed, the Daily Mirror ran a two-page LOTR spread on Monday in which the word "Toronto" wasn't mentioned once.

And, gee, if they weren't listening to the hated critics, Wallace and director Matthew Warchus were certainly listening to somebody.

It would be a stretch to say that The Lord of the Rings, which opened last night but is reviewed here in its final preview, seemed like an entirely different play from the one that opened to equal fanfare in Toronto.

But as promised, the musical -- which once ran all of five hours in its earliest Canadian previews -- has been reduced to exactly three hours, with intermission. Not since Jared, the Subway Sandwich guy, have we witnessed a weight loss this significant.

At least one of the cuts was easy, and cleverly pulled off. A play that once had two intermissions now has one. At what is clearly the end of Act 2 -- when Gollum (Canadian Michael Therriault) finishes arguing with himself and decides to deliver Frodo to the giant spider Shelob -- the curtain falls, but the lights stay down, and a small army of angry Orcs enters the house to keep people in their seats.

If LOTR doesn't make it in London, these guys at least have a future in crowd control.

Another quite welcome cut was the weird, West Side Story-ish, contemporary gang-rumble finale that had Canadian audiences going, "Huh?" The London production's finale is a mirror of Peter Jackson's movie. Some other scenes are reduced to narration or exposition.

The effect of this streamlining is to accentuate what was good about The Lord of the Rings. Despite Wallace's dyspepsia, few reviews of the Canadian production were outright pans (our own John Coulbourn gave it 31/2 stars out of five).

The first act is still the best and most briskly paced -- eight minutes before Frodo (James Loye) gets his marching orders from Gandalf the wizard (Malcolm Storry), 20 minutes before he's injured in a Black Rider ambush and nursed back to health by the elves Arwen (Rosalie Craig) and Elrond (Andrew Jarvis), and a half hour before the "Fellowship" of Gimli the dwarf (Sevan Stephan), Legolas (Michael Rouse), Boromir (Steven Miller) and Aragorn (Jerome Pradon) set forth to Mordor to destroy the evil Sauron's ring of power in the fires of Mount Doom.

There's a more pronounced staginess to the British production. Even pronouncements of love to Arwen are bellowed by this Aragorn. And Brian Protheroe as the evil wizard Saruman has a weird delivery that, at times, channels Willian Shatner.

The best addition, though, is Laura Michelle Kelly -- best known hereabouts as the lead of the hugely popular Mary Poppins musical -- as the elf-queen Galadriel. She sings the play's one memorable song, Lothlorien. A changeup artist, she turns on a dime from a twittering Good Witch Glenda-type to a powerhouse.

But for the real key to how much better a stage experience this LOTR is, look no further than Therriault, whose Gollum is richer and more galvanizingly attention-grabbing than ever, with a back-breaking body language that is a veritable Cirque du Soleil act, and whose applause at curtain was loudest of all.

In the end, whether Tolkien works in this format is a personal decision. But it's easier to look at The Lord of the Rings musical now and consider it against the productions it should be compared to -- Miss Saigon, Cats and Phantom. It still doesn't have, say, Phantom's hum-ability or soap-opera emotional pull, but otherwise compares fairly well to its competitors.

And none of those were exactly critics' darlings either.