It’s finally here – the year’s most anticipated theatrical opening, costing £12.5 million and heralded by high hopes on one hand and prophecies of doom on the other. When I saw Matthew Warchus’s production in Toronto last year, I was dazzled and delighted by its ingenuity and visual invention. I was also frustrated by its slower, muddier passages, unimpressed by some key performances and deeply disappointed by its bungled climax.

Happily, almost everything that was wrong has been put right. Some will prefer the slick grandiosity of Peter Jackson’s films; others will sneer at the very idea of singing hobbits. It’s their loss. Warchus and his team have a created a brave, stirring, epic piece of popular theatre that, without slavishly adhering to J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels, embraces their spirit. The show has charm, wit, and jaw-dropping theatrical brio; crucially, it also has real emotional heft.

Warchus’s and Shaun McKenna’s book has been streamlined, but at more than three hours the show is still long – yet it doesn’t outstay its welcome. Rob Howell’s stunning tree-roots design stretches out into the auditorium, and performers, too, spill from the stage, creating a fantastical environment that draws you in and grips you from beginning to end. Hobbits chase fireflies along the aisles; screeching, leather-clad orcs not only leap and somersault, on springed shoes, across the stage’s multiple revolving levels, but, startlingly, loom over unwary spectators. Frodo puts on the ring and vanishes before your eyes. Huge black riders and a hideously hairy giant spider, conjured through adroit puppetry and brilliantly lit by Paul Pyant, become creatures of genuine terror.

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• Singing orcs

But there’s more here than spectacle. The music, by the Indian composer A.R. Rahman and the Finnish folk group Värttinä with Christopher Nightingale, airy and earthy by turns, carries and intensifies the story’s swell of feeling. Themes of friendship, of the destruction of innocence and a world divided by race and belief emerge powerfully. The bond between James Loye’s courageous Frodo and Peter Howe’s loyal Sam is warmly affecting. Malcolm Storry’s compelling Gandalf blends otherworldly wisdom with patriarchal concern, and Laura Michelle Kelly as Galadriel, a sweet-voiced golden vision who descends in a skein of silk, is both ethereally lovely and magisterial. When Rosalie Craig as Arwen bids farewell to Jérôme Pradon’s sexily charismatic Aragorn, you glimpse the timeless agony of women down the ages sending their men off to war.

Most memorable of all is Michael Therriault’s riveting Gollum, muttering, growling, slithering, crawling and darting, part insect, part reptile. Listening to Frodo and Sam comforting each other with an old fireside song, he is torn between longing, hateful resentment and flickering affection; Therriault’s evocation of a mind and body tormented and divided is extraordinary.

Peter Darling’s choreography thrills, from a rousing tavern song to welters of warring orcs to an aerial elfin ballet; and though Warchus keeps the stage constantly bustling there is not a note sung, not a movement or an effect that doesn’t serve the story.

The battle scenes still struggle to create a sufficient sense of scale; and the inevitable telescoping of Tolkien’s dense material can be disorientating. But snobbery and cynicism be damned: this show is a wonder. Go with an open mind, an open heart, and wide-open eyes, and prepare for enchantment.

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