The 2012-13 Broadway season has just barely started, but theater fanatics (like myself) are already eyeing what shows will be likely Tony Award contenders.
Many hopes are pinned on the new movie-to-musical adaptation of Kinky Boots, which features a score by pop star Cyndi Lauper and a script by out playwright/performer Harvey Fierstein (its world premiere pre-Broadway tryout hits Chicago's Bank of America Theatre from Oct. 2 to Nov. 4).
However, the main musical to beat this season appears to be Matilda the Musical.
It's Carrie for kids!
Matilda is one of the latter children's novels by Roald Dahl, the late British author famed for other favorites like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach. I wasn't sure if Matilda possessed a strong enough story to warrant a glitzy musical-theater transformation, but I was pleasantly proven wrong when I recently caught the musical in London last month.
The Royal Shakespeare Company commissioned Matilda, and it opened to rapturous reviews in Stratford-Upon-Avon in 2010. The show transferred to the Cambridge Theatre in London's West End in 2011, where it has been a continual box-office hit. Matilda the Musical also carries the distinction of winning seven Olivier Awards (London's equivalent to Broadway's Tony Awards), the most ever for a single production.
Australian/British singer/songwriter Tim Michin, who has crafted a peppy and quirky score to suit Dennis Kelly's masterful adaptation of Dahl's original book, has certainly earned the accolades. Matilda concerns a bookish child prodigy who is not appreciated by her TV-loving family. She must also cope with Miss Trunchbull, the violent, child-hating headmistress of Matilda's school who terrorizes her and her classmates. Luckily Matilda has support in the form of librarian Mrs. Phelps (Melanie La Berrie) and the teacher Miss Honey (Haley Flaherty), plus some magic powers.
Kelly's aggrandizements to Dahl's original characters provide extra flashy laughs (as in making Matilda's couch-potato mum played by Josie Walker into a garish competitive ballroom dancer) and unexpected poignancy that can surprisingly move you to tears (especially with a heart-wrenching back story for Miss Honey).
Another key element to Matilda the Musical's success is the decision to have the villainous and butch Miss Trunchbull played by a man in schoolmarm drag. Bertie Carvel won an Olivier for his performance, but by the time I caught the show, Alastair Parker was pulling in the laughs in the role. (He was filling in for an indisposed David Leonard.)
Choreographer Peter Darling has a great time with the book's cartoon-like violence and in song sequences like the ballroom number "Loud" and Miss Trunchbull's gym-class routine in "The Smell of Rebellion." Director Matthew Warchus' production works extremely well on Rob Howell's igneous Scrabble-inspired set and with his colorful costume designs, while Hugh Vanstone's lighting certainly adds a sense of magic to the entire show.
There's lots of room for great performances in Matilda, not only from the kids (up to five different girls rotate in the title role, with Isobelle Molloy giving a strong performance the night I saw it), but also for the grown-ups.
All of these elements help to make Matilda the Musical a treat not only for kids, but their discerning parents as well. How well Matilda the Musical will fare on Broadway may depend upon the competition from other kid-targeted shows (a revival of Annie is planned for this season) and if audiences are willing to embrace its very British-ness in tone (which didn't seem to be an issue for Billy Elliot The Musical).
Matilda the Musical continues in an open run at the Cambridge Theatre in London. A Broadway production of Matilda is set to start previews March 4, 2013, with an official opening April 11 at the Shubert Theatre in New York. For more information, visit www.matildathemusical.com .
A starry Sweeney Todd
Also while I was in the U.K., I made it a point not to miss the Chichester Festival Theatre's West End transfer of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
This was mainly due to the above-the-title stars of Michael Ball (the original Marius in Les Miserables) in the murderous title role and Imelda Staunton (famed for her Academy Award-nominated turn in Mike Leigh's film Vera Drake and as the Harry Potter villainess Dolores Umbridge) as his meat-pie baking accomplice, Mrs. Lovett.
The two British stars didn't disappoint, especially Staunton who found a way to make the conniving Mrs. Lovett her own (her character's desperation of nearly being caught by the Beadle Bamford of Peter Polycarpou was a master class in stage acting). Technically, Michael Ball wowed in a nearly unrecognizable form as the revengeful barber.
Controversially, director Jonathan Kent updated the setting to the Great Depression rather than the original Victorian era, as specified in Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim's original script and score. But other than the occasional Victorian-era reference in the lyrics, the updating to the 1930s didn't jar too much.
In fact, Kent found an insightful way to structure the piece as a flashback for the ensemble, who we discover by the end are cleaning up the massacre site and are already indulging in gallows humor to cope with the horror of it all.
Alas, this truly great production seems very unlikely to transfer to the United States. Both Ball and Staunton have other commitments after the limited run concludes, and the grand scale of the production might be too costly for New York investors (especially when the 2005 Broadway revival was a conceptual cost-saving affair where the actors played their own instruments). So there's little time left to savor this masterful interpretation of Sweeney Todd.
Sweeney Todd continues through Sept. 22 at London's Adelphi Theatre. A 2012 London cast recording of highlights is available on First Night Records. Visit www.sweeneytoddwestend.com for more information.
