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| Dennis Kelly |
Read the full article here.
"In 2008, director Warchus and Minchin, a rising star of the European circuit, were brought on. Kelly sheepishly recalls how he thought he’d just leave holes in his story for Minchin to plug with songs: “Apparently that’s not how it works.” Critics have attributed much of Matilda’s success to his and Minchin’s creative chemistry, fuelled, Matilda actor Paul Kaye says, by “exactly the right level of mischief and twisted creativity”. Kelly says he loved working with the generous and collegial Perth-born composer (“Tim is a genuinely decent, lovely person, he is pretty much how he is on stage, he’s a laugh”) but there were “definitely” moments of tension, particularly when a major rework he did of the script saw a key character, Hortensia, cut.
Minchin had written his two best songs for her, and was reportedly “hysterical with grief” for months. “But he eventually came around. He knew we made the right decision.”
Kelly speaks of a difficult gestation. Matilda was born out of a tricky juggle between what to musicalise and what to leave as text, numerous, often painful cuts, and difficult decisions (at one point there were thoughts of the children being played by adults, or Matilda being played by a puppet). There were multiple workshops, one of which, late in the stage, left everyone with “long faces because it just didn’t work, everyone was going, ‘What the f..k? This is a disaster.’ ”
Eventually, a clean, sharp Matilda opened to glowing critical praise — and not without a few tears from the adult audience. Kelly has a theory as to the show’s emotional appeal: there’s deep poignancy, reflected in some of Minchin’s quieter songs, in Matilda’s unself-pitying approach to life, and this, he feels, always jerks the tears — or his at least (“though it’s pretty uncool to cry at your own musical”.)
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| Matilda |
The New York Times praised Matilda for its big reach in addressing many current national worries in Britain, including a decaying education system, business corruption, organised crime and “the mind-rotting effects of bad television”. There’s a “raging thirst these days for tonics of the sort that Matilda dispenses”, wrote theatre critic Brantley. So glum was the state of things in Britain, Brantley continued, that “last year Prime Minister David Cameron announced the creation of a ‘happiness agenda’ that would evaluate the general (presumably depressive) state of mind of the British population and consider how to improve it”.
Website: http://au.matildathemusical.com/
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