“The Hobbit” at Theatre in the Round Understands the Heart of LARPing

Greg Banks’s adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is not quite a straight book-to-stage translation. The story is told through a framing device: that of a group of survivors 30 years in the future, following an apocalyptic event (the exact nature of which remains vague). When the actors scheduled to perform The Hobbit are delayed, the community members band together to put on a show with what costumes and props they can find.

The titular hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, is played on the Theatre in the Round stage by Isabelle Hopewell, who blends his anxiety and uncertainty at the start of the story with her own framing device character’s initial stage fright. The audience follows not only Bilbo’s journey toward heroism but also the in-story actor’s development in becoming more confident and learning to embrace her character. Bilbo’s outfit has been modernized (futurized?) to a tweed vest that glows under black light and a pair of red Converse sneakers, a departure from the book’s depiction of hobbits as preferring to be barefoot.

Isabelle Hopewell as Bilbo Baggins, Bryce Kalal as Thorin Oakenshield, and Wini Froelich and Troy Lowry Jr. as dwarves. Aaron Mark Photo Film

The remaining nine actors in the cast are billed as the ensemble and all play multiple roles. Wini Froelich, for example (who was recently in Frank Theater’s The Welkin), plays the roles of both the wizard Gandalf and one of the 13 dwarves, which leaves her in the position of often having to make a comedic excuse to duck offstage and change costumes. Bryce Kalal plays dwarven king Thorin Oakenshield with wonderful prowess, and Troy Lowry Jr. plays the creature Gollum with a perfectly wet vibe as well as depicting the dwarf Fili. I was delighted to see Sasha Rapacz on the cast list because we went to the same high school, where we were involved in a few of the same theater productions; he plays one of the dwarves as well as Bard, the Laketown citizen who takes on the dragon Smaug. Along with other ensemble members, Rapacz also provides a soundtrack to the play from a box above the stage.

In bringing The Hobbit to a small stage, with its constraints on the scale of the set and cast, this version actually solves one of the challenges of adapting this particular story: the number of characters. There are 15 central characters in The Hobbit—Bilbo, Gandalf, and the 13 dwarves—not to mention a whole host of side characters, including goblins, elves, Gollum, and the citizens of Laketown. On the page, most of these characters can exist in the background, but that many people on a stage would quickly become hard to follow. In addition to the small cast, audience participation is thrown in to round out the world in certain scenes, which deepens the meta perspective of the play.

That said, The Hobbit doesn’t always feel at home in a dark, confined theater. The framing device of the apocalypse survivors’ community aid center aids in some suspension of disbelief, but this production, at least to me, feels like it would be much more at home at an outdoor venue. The theater-in-the-round stage setup does work in The Hobbit‘s favor, but the execution seems almost too big for its small stage and too bold in its premise for the simple theater.

The Theatre in the Round stage. Theatre in the Round

For reasons of tone, run time, and the constraints of live theater, this version of The Hobbit is blessed with a somewhat lighter tone (and as a result a lighter ending) than either the novel or its two film adaptations, the 1977 Rankin and Bass animated film or Peter Jackson’s 2010s live action trilogy. If anything, the play is more aesthetically similar to the animated film, but it has its own identity beyond the novel or any of its other adaptations.

The play preserves the novel’s use of songs, poems, and chants as storytelling devices, which works well for theater, but it also adds some details of its own, mostly in the form of specific props used. In the tradition of old radio plays, but more famously in the tradition of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, coconut halves are tapped together to simulate the clack of ponies’ hooves. Various objects are used in place of weapons, like hockey sticks and croquet mallets for swords, brooms for spears, a guitar for a bow, and a tall, skinny lamp for Gandalf’s signature staff. In the same vein as the Monty Python nod, the leader of the goblins, called the Great Goblin in the novel, comes onstage in a blond mullet wig and holding a ball in one hand in reference to David Bowie’s character of the Goblin King in Labyrinth.

Besides the pop culture references, one of the other things that sets the play apart from its source material and other adaptations is the direct influence of live action role-play. LARPing makes heavy use of improvisation and homemade props and costumes, and working with the space and materials available are core values. If anything, the LARPing aspect makes the whole show work, between its general self-awareness (via the framing device) and the simulated look of spontaneity in the play’s details.

Theater in the Round

For fans of the book or films, Greg Banks’s stage play offers a fresh perspective, and for new audiences, especially younger ones, the show can serve as a comfortable and easy-to-digest introduction to Tolkien’s work. While the show sometimes seems too big for its stage, Theatre in the Round is also uniquely equipped to put on a show with a large audience participation element, and though some aspects of the book were a little harder to translate to stage, it was all presented in a fun and undoubtedly dynamic way.

The Hobbit runs at around 2 hours and 30 minutes with a 15-minute intermission. The show is on until May 31, 2026, at Theatre in the Round in Minneapolis. You can find more information and book tickets on the Theatre in the Round website.