I saw Hobitti, the play based on J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit book. The play was pretty well made, it had a lot of imposing scenes and costumes. Turku's circus was hired to be in the play, so there was a lot of tricks with fire and other circus tricks. I actually saw their Lord of the Rings play back in 2018 and decided no to write about it. This is really a shame, since I would have loved to read my thoughts about it. So I decided to write about the Hobbit play. Mika Kujala returned as Gandalf and Miska Kaukonen as Gollum. Bilbo is usually played by Teemu Aromaa, but this time he was played by understudy Ville Seivo. Thorin Oakenshield was played by Stefan Karlsson and Fili and Kili were played by Ulla Reinikainen and Minna Hämäläinen. Gloin was played by Antti Kyllönen and Dwalin by Marko Pekkarinen. As you can see there was only five dwarves and Fili and Kili were played by women. Of course thirteen dwarves would not work and I understand that, but I'm not really sure if I liked the fact Fili and Kili were played by women. Everyone did fantastic job, I especially liked Miska Kaukonen as Gollum as his costume was so well made.
Miska Kaukonen also played other roles, like troll Tom, Thranduil, and a guard in the Laketown. I was especially interested how they would make Thranduil as I absolutely loved the film version of him. Thranduil was done pretty nicely, I really liked his costumes. He had a green robe in his first scene and a green robe and brown armor in the Battle of Five Armies. I also liked his crown, as it was different what we've seen in the films.
Janne Sundqvist played many characters including Beorn, troll William, big orc and guard of Laketown. Beorn was the part I liked best, since he managed to portray Beorn really well. Beorn looked really cool, I liked how he was acted and he also had his bear form. They also showed his servants, who were people in animal costumes.
The translation was bit odd since they created words that have not been used in Finnish Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit books. In Finnish Gollum's "precious" is "aarre", here they sometimes called it "ihanuus" which has never been used and sometimes "aarre". Also Bilbo is called "burglar" and that is usually translated as "voro". Here it was translated as "aarteenetsijä" which literally means "treasure seeker" and I was a little bit confused.
The circus performers also played the spiders in Mirkwood and their costumes were pretty great. They crawled from the roof and their movements were so spider-like.
The book had the problem with no female characters, and I liked how some of the orcs had female actors (even though the characters were still probably male) and some of the Mirkwood guard elves were women. This kind of bothered me when I read the book, but to be honest, I originally really disliked Tauriel from the movies who was created to fix this problem, but now I think she's fine.
And of course, there's the climax, Smaug and the Battle of Five Armies. Smaug was a huge puppet and he was cool. His movements were done really nicely, and I liked his voice. I could not find from the program who was his voice actor. They had him have a hole in his scales, and then Bard shot him down. They had a screen where they showed Smaug attacking the Laketown and then his death. The Battle itself was very short and I was a bit disappointed. They basically fast forward the whole thing, the whole Battle was over in a minute. But overall the show was pretty good.
