The First one I am going to mention is the Brit import "Matilda," which may not be the top grosser but is the one that has all the critics excited.
Well, a lot of adults refer to kids as "the little monsters" jokingly and you realize that there is always a clash between the kids' world and the world of their elders. Now that caning and other physical punishments have been outlawed in British schools, I guess the idea is that the teachers and heads of schools express their displeasure more with attitudes like disgust and sarcasm..
But let' see what kind of review we can find for Matilda--here is a kind of think piece, second -thought review from the NY Times
... And a Child Should Lead Them
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Oona Laurence is one of four
young actresses who play the title role in “Matilda the Musical.” The
piece balances lightness and darkness and is full of pithy philosophical
comments.
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: May 9, 2013
In a season when Broadway often seemed to be losing its mind and its
mojo, the wisest advice came from a 5-year-old: “If you’re stuck in your
story and want to get out/You don’t have to cry and you don’t have to
shout!”
Complete Coverage
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Ben Thompson and Milly Shapiro (as Matilda, a master
storyteller hounded by parents and headmistress alike), in this British
import based on the character from a 1988 Roald Dahl book.
Those calming words were uttered — or sung, to be exact — by the title
character and all-conquering hero of “Matilda the Musical,” which opened
at the Shubert Theater in April to ecstatic reviews
and ticket sales to match. When we first meet her, Matilda Wormwood,
who was born in a 1988 children’s novel by Roald Dahl, is indeed stuck
in a lonely and loveless life, hounded by stupid parents and the evil
headmistress of her school.
But Matilda, to whom adversity has taught stoicism, does not scream. Nor
does she get all excited and throw her body around the stage in a
frantic bid for attention. She doesn’t even sing one of those
sympathy-demanding ballads of desperation that her older kin in
conventional book musicals are prone to at such moments.
Instead, she determines to rewrite her life, to fix whatever is stupid
and repellent and abrasive in it. And though it turns out she possesses
telekinetic powers, like Stephen King’s Carrie, she doesn’t really need
them. She has more powerful tools on her side, in which she trusts
unconditionally: intelligence and imagination. The same might be said of
the show in which she appears, a British import brought to life by the
Royal Shakespeare Company.
Many of the rest of the productions that opened on Broadway in the past
year did not share Matilda’s faith in rationality and inventiveness. You
might say that they were stuck in old claustrophobic stories that were
choking the life out of them. These included cynical narratives in which
the presence of a movie star (Jessica Chastain, Scarlett Johansson,
Katie Holmes) is thought to guarantee a happy ending. Or tales (hello,
“Pippin”!) in which an intrepid show slays ‘em in the aisles by making
lots of noise and looks flashy.
In support of this point of view, allow me to introduce another of the
resident philosophers in “Matilda.” That’s Mrs. Wormwood, Matilda’s
mother and a trophy-winning competitive ballroom dancer. Here’s what she
has to say, in a number entitled “Loud”: “The less you have to sell,
the harder you sell it.” And: “What you know matters less/Than the
volume with which what you don’t know’s expressed.”
Quite a nice little couplet, isn’t it? It’s courtesy of Tim Minchin, the
show’s songwriter and the member of a team, which notably includes the
director Matthew Warchus and the book writer Dennis Kelly, that steadily
ignores Mrs. Wormwood’s counsel.
“Matilda” may occasionally suffer from the Broadway bête noire of
overamplification (or so I’ve been told by several distressed
theatergoing correspondents). But at heart it is anything but loud. Its
components have been assembled with a quiet confidence rooted in the
belief that nothing projects as clearly as an unswervingly sustained
melody.
By that I don’t mean that “Matilda” lacks variety, musically or
otherwise. On the contrary, it is always balancing light and darkness,
sincerity and satire, reassurance and scariness. But at a moment when
many Broadway shows seem to consist of jimmied-together mismatched
parts, “Matilda” is remarkably of a piece. Designed by Rob Howell, with
lighting by Hugh Vanstone, it lays out its elements of style for all to
see from the beginning.
Audiences arriving at the Shubert are greeted by an uncurtained stage
filled with letter-bearing blocks, outsized versions of what you might
find on a nursery floor, and a seeming infinity of bookcases. When I
first saw “Matilda” in London last year, I was accompanied by a novelist
who gasped when she first saw the set and murmured, “This is every
writer’s dream.”
I know what she means. The set is a challenge and a teeming sea of
potential, from which both the show’s creators and its leading character
must extract meaning and substance. From letters come words, from which
come sentences, from which come stories, which if you retain control of
them can transform lives.
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