Matilda The Musical coming to Auckland

Matilda The Musical
by Dennis Kelly
Music and Lyrics, Tim Minchin
Civic Theatre, Auckland from August 18

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Matilda The Musical will premiere in Auckland this August for a limited season at the Civic. It has been playing to sell-out houses across Australia with standing ovations at every performance.

The Royal Shakespeare Company was last here in 2007 with Trevor Nunn’s productions of King Lear and The Seagull, featuring Sir Ian McKellen.

The Australian production of Matilda is the most awarded musical in Australian theatrical history, having scooped a record-breaking 13 Helpmann Awards – winning every possible musical category – and has just been nominated in all possible categories of Melbourne’s 2017 Green Room Awards.

The play is based on the children's novel by Roald Dahl, who also wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Fantastic Mr Fox. It is the story of an extraordinary girl who, armed with a vivid imagination and a sharp mind, dares to take a stand and change her own destiny.

It is directed by Tony Award winner Matthew Warchus (God of Carnage).

The production has sets and costumes by Tony Award winner Rob Howell, with choreography by Tony Award winner Peter Darling (Billy Elliot), orchestrations, additional music and musical supervision by Christopher Nightingale, lighting by Tony Award winner Hugh Vanstone and sound by Simon Baker.

The play was originally commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and played to sold-out audiences at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon for 12 weeks before transferring to London’s West End to rave reviews.

The New York production of the play, which opened in 2013  was rated Time Magazine’s #1 Show of the Year.

The play also swept the board at the 2012 Laurence Olivier Awards in London with a record-breaking seven awards and won four Tony Awards and a Tony Honor for Excellence in the Theater for each of the four girls sharing the title role on Broadway in 2013.

I reviewed the work when it opened in Sydney last year saying, “It’s a tragi-comedy for children and a cautionary tale for adults and children which traces the life of Matilda from her birth, which is a shocking imposition on her parents and she continues to be a problem, taking to reading, observing and commenting. By the time, she turns five and goes to school, she has read all the classics including Dostoevsky, in Russian. Her teacher, Miss Honey, sees her as a genius but her parent thinks she is unnatural and bans her from reading. As her dad says, 'all I know I learned from television.' She triumphs over adversity, even saving her father from suffering at the hand of the Russian Mafia – her reading of Dostoyevsky has its uses.

"It’s a brilliantly directed work but what makes this musical special is the clever script that never feels as if it is a lot of candy floss. The sweetness is tempered with sharp cutting realism and it all feels much gutsier than most of the musicals of  this century."