'Matilda the Musical' at the Academy of Music

In Matilda the Musical, based on Roald Dahl’s book of the same name, Matilda is burdened with the most awful family that anyone could wish for. The precocious five year old, played adorably on Tuesday night by Mabel Tyler (alternating with Gabrielle Gutierrez and Mia Sinclair Jenness on other nights), is the progeny of Mr. Wormwood (Quinn Mattfeld), all ego and idiocy, who wishes she were a boy, and Mrs. Wormwood (Cassie Silva), obsessed with ballroom dancing, who wishes that she weren’t there at all.

I was raised on Struwwelpeter (Slovenly Peter) by Heinrich Hoffmann, which included “The Dreadful Story of Harriet and the Matches,” in which a young girl plays with matches and burns herself into ashes, and “The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb,” in which a boy’s thumbs are cut off, so I should be inured to fairy tales like these. Even so, it’s hard not to see the abuse lurking beneath the seemingly humorous depiction of cruelty.

“Looks over books”

Matilda is the story of an unwanted child who is sent off to a school run by the formidable Mrs. Trunchbull (Bryce Ryness). Matilda, it seems, is a genius. She has read Dickens by age five and can do sums in her head. To her parents, who have chosen “looks over books,” this makes her undesirable. They would prefer that she watch the telly, like normal people. Matilda finds comfort from the local librarian Mrs. Phelps (Ora Jones) and her new teacher, Miss Honey (Jennifer Blood), as well as her new BFF Lavender (Charlie Kersh). And in the end, of course, she triumphs over her surroundings and finds a new home filled with love.

After seeing the show, I felt compelled to go and read the book — something I had missed along the way. It’s less painful, I realized, to learn about the cruelty of Matilda’s parents through the sophisticated, sarcastic voice of the author, than to see the actual mistreatment of a child on stage. And Matilda’s plotting is ever so much more deliberate, when we can peer into her thoughts in the book, than when we see her randomly taking revenge on the spur of the moment by applying crazy glue to the brim of her father’s hat or turning his hair green.

The musical should have been good fun, and by the second act it had hit its stride, but the deliberately over-the-top performances and the (presumably unintended) jarring quality of the sound prevented me from getting totally immersed in the silliness. There was lots of good fun to be had, and the maniacal quality of Ryness’s tyrannical Mrs. Trunchbull provoked applause whenever he/she appeared, especially when she performed an acrobatic feat toward the end.

We seem willing to forgive nastiness as long as we can laugh at it, especially in theater, when no one gets hurt by it. And teaching children that life is not all bubblegum and lollipops is probably a worthwhile lesson, although whether this is really a show for children can be debated. However, I really wish the Academy of Music would work on its sound system. This is not the first show where I’ve been unable to understand much of what is being sung because the sound is just too loud.

Editor’s note: Scholars have tackled the significance of violence in children’s literature. Bruno Bettelheim’s 1976 book, The Uses of Enchantment, has influenced both scholarship and the postmodern presentation of fairy tales, such as Sondheim and Lapine’s Into the Woods. A more recent consideration, Megan Creasey’s 2010 analysis, can be found here.