Full title ROALD DAHL'S MATILDA THE MUSICAL to distinguish this new adaptation from The Original Book; a 1996 film; the stage musical; and a video capture of that stage show out earlier this year. That’s a lot of MATILDA!, you’d think the material would be all played out. (And you might be on to something.) Matilda, our super brilliant tween prodigy in literature & math, unwanted at home by ghastly parental units, gets a chance to attend school at Crunchem Hall. But in going for her bliss Matilda comes up against Head Mistress Miss Trunchbull, a tank of an antagonist (gnawed to a fare-the-well by Emma Thompson), and Matilda will have to ‘get nasty’ to triumph. Fortunately, she’s got sympathetic teacher Miss Honey (Lashana Lynch) and a school of rebellion-ready students on her side. Director Matthew Warchus, working with Tim Minchin’s tuneless tunes and mass movement in place of actual choreography, hopes execution and fast editing will trump material; and he almost generates enough propulsion (along with some adorably eccentric kids) to camouflage all the mediocrity. (Standard issue for British Musicals when you think about it.) But there’s something relentless about how he just keeps coming at you. More theatre guy than movie director, Warchus wears you down to force a response, as much a bully as Miss Trunchbull. And once it finally ends, those melodic earworms lingering in your head turn out to be from other shows. No wonder the final shots show the school as a three-ring circus. Truth in advertizing, at last.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: They must have been trying for something between ANNIE and OLIVER! ANNIE, famously, has had a pretty unhappy film history (see 1982; 2014; or live tv 2021), but Carol Reed’s much Oscar’d film of OLIVER!/’68 (recently restored to astonishing effect) is not just superb, but infinitely better (nay, purified) from the original stage version.
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