Matilda the Musical

Shubert Theatre, New York

(212) 239-6200

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Matilda might just be “the most satisfying and subversive musical” ever to have hopped the pond, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. A show that could have been groan-worthy family fare turns out instead to be “an insurrection against tyranny, television, and impoverished imaginations.” Roald Dahl likely had just such a revolution in mind when he wrote his tale of a brilliant, telekinetically empowered 5-year-old girl who’s thwarted by the adults in charge both at home and at school. Imported from London’s West End, this production is in many ways a traditional musical. Yet within that conventional form, “Matilda works with astonishing slyness to inculcate us with its radical point of view”—that words, language, books, and stories are invaluable weapons against dull, stifling, or wrong thinking of any kind.

Don’t worry if you don’t have a child to bring along with you, said Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal. This is a musical more than capable of entrancing even adults “who normally wouldn’t be caught dead” patronizing a children’s-book adaptation. Composer Tim Minchin has created a “riotously eclectic” score that “skitters unpredictably from pop to jazz to semi-Sondheim to good old-fashioned razzamatazz.” The young actress who played Matilda on opening night (she’s one of four) never mugged or even smiled, letting the story generate the audience’s emotional response. The show, as a result, becomes “so much more touching than musicals in which the crying-time sign is flashed with Pavlovian predictability.”

Matilda’s arch nemesis is a sight to behold, said David Benedict in Variety. Bertie Carvel plays evil headmistress Miss Trunchbull in drag, and he’s “jaw-droppingly original.” Hair wrenched into a bun, “he gleams with almost orgasmic sotto-voce malice” as he totters about, hurling threats at his charges: “It’s like watching a hippo on ballet pointes lobbing hand grenades.” The children unfortunate enough to be in Trunchbull’s care, meanwhile, are played with admirable restraint: During the song “When I Grow Up,” they fly high on swings, yet “it’s impossible to miss the inchoate feelings of loss and hope flooding beneath the surface.” A children’s-book-based show that brims with both exuberance and nuance? “No one saw it coming.”