Review: ‘Matilda’ Wows Audiences with Innovation and Charm At Mumbai’s NMACC

Children are gifted with the most acute and vivid sense of imagination. They often create a world outside their real world which they visit now and then. Sometimes it becomes an alternate reality in their lives. By the time they grow up and the harsh realities of life begin to occupy the spaces where their imagination once dwelt, they start to live a more literal life.

A few escape this mundane process of ‘growing up’ as they grow from adolescents to adults. Roald Dahl (1916 – 1990) was certainly one such person. His imagination stayed young all his life.

Author of a series of books for children, replete with imaginative scenarios, his large body of work has been very popular with children (of all ages). He wrote Matilda in 1988, just two years before his death, rich in imagination and the curiosity of the child.

It is one thing to have a book written for children with vivid accounts of extraordinary events but quite another challenge to create a musical for stage from this material. Translating the written word into flesh and blood with actors instead of print and music in place of punctuation is a daunting task.

The Royal Shakespeare Company from the U.K. has undertaken this project and emerged with a spectacular stage show with clever lyrics and music to tell a fascinating tale of an extraordinarily intelligent little girl navigating her troubled life through the length of the musical. The music and lyrics are by Tim Minchin while Dennis Kelly has adapted Dahl’s work with Matilda The Musical.

For the audience, the presence of a live orchestra conducted by Louis Zurnamer from South Africa was an additional dimension.

The utterly charming Matilda is also played by South African Donna Craig who clearly dominates the show. (For their tenure in Mumbai, three separate young girls essay the role of Matilda; the other two are Yolani Balfour and Myla Williams).

The flow of events in the musical is smooth, if frenzied at times and the music creates the glue that holds it together. The use of a double bass, bass clarinet, bass trombone, clarinet, electric bass and other wind instruments, keyboards and cello is very clever and in the background, the musical arrangements accentuate and emphasize the various dramatic moments. After the show, we spoke to the music conductor, the aforementioned Zurnamer about the use of unusual instruments; the bass clarinet and bass slide trombone are indeed rare by themselves and particularly in combination with the cello and keyboards! He explained how it was essential to create the exact effect at various moments and that these musical textures were possible with clever innovations and combinations. This meticulous attention to detail certainly enhanced the overall enjoyment of the musical.

On stage, the timing of movements, even the athletic endeavors — with the use of trampolines, trapezes, swings and springboards — were split second perfect and highlighted the amount of rehearsal that ensured their precision.

The actors looked the parts they played; apart from the brilliant Craig as Matilda, the parts essayed by James Wolstenholme as the vicious school headmistress Miss Trunchbull, Gina Beck as Miss Honey the kind school teacher, Emily Squibb and Matthew Roland as Matilda’s parents were convincing. One only wonders why a man was cast to play the role of the headmistress!

The young students and support cast were on song, almost literally.

A particularly pleasing episode in the play was the dance sequence where Emily Squibb and a brilliant Ryan Anderson as Rudolpho, a Spanish/Italian perform a beautiful dance in preparation for a contest. Anderson moved as if he were an India rubber man!

At a high point of the evening’s performance, Matilda has us riveted to a story from her imagination, which she relates to the librarian Mrs. Phelps. She tells this tale in three installments and keeps us and Mrs. Phelps guessing about the outcome. The story is about a trapeze artist and an escapologist and ultimately has a resonance with the life of her teacher, Miss Honey.

Sixteen songs are the links for the movement of the musical with “When I Grow Up,’ “The Chokey Chant” and “My House” being outstanding.

On the whole, it is a fine production with a thought-provoking concept. One observed that the diabolical Miss Trunchbull, the cruel headmistress belonging to the Victorian era of Oliver Twist, was fast-forwarded into a contemporary, multi-racial England where such characters are, hopefully, obsolete; but it created an effective counterpoint to the unfolding of Matilda’s tale.

The character Matilda also threw some happy surprises our way first with her prowess with mathematics, then with mentally moving objects and later by creating some writing on the blackboard from a distance. Most of all her upright values and strength to stand up for them send a subtle message to the large audience of children in attendance.

The accents and pace of delivery of the actors might be difficult for many in the audience to follow. We would recommend that children coming to the musical should familiarise themselves with the story of Matilda to get the most out of this fascinating, imaginative story.