loud and quiet
by Douglas Messerli
Tim Minchin (music and lyrics), Dennis
Kelly (book), Matilda / New York,
Sam S. Schubert Theatre, the performance I attended as a matinee on May 5, 2013
The set, consisting of a series of
lettered blocks cascading across the stage and into the audience space, was
quite innovative, and all the technical aspects of this work, particularly the
lighting, was well done. And who wouldn’t love the ridiculously mean
child-hater, Miss Trunchbull (played in drag by the excellent Bertie Carvel),
the absurdly mindless Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood (Leslie Margherita and Gabriel
Ebert) and their brain dead son, Michael (Taylor Trensch). The choruses of
urchin dancers put their collective talents in high gear through singing and
dancing, and little Oona Lawrence (playing the role of Matilda in the
performance I witnessed) was charmingly able and cute. The audience, filled
with overweight girls whose parents think it their responsibility to stock each
of them with sacks of candies to be crunched throughout the play, absolutely loved it. So why didn’t I?
Part of the problem was simply the mumbling of the mostly British cast
(Brantley did warn of this). Accordingly, it was often simply hard to
understand the lyrics of the basically tuneless songs, although I perceived a
kind of mild cleverness in the lyrics nonetheless, particularly if you delight
in children admitting to their “naughtiness.” Having perceived that problem in
expression, perhaps, the director turned up the volume, as if we were all hard
of hearing. In fact in the 7th song of act one, the singers note that issue
precisely in the number “Loud,” and in the final act Matilda herself observes,
momentarily at least, that things have grown “Quiet,” alas the third song from
the last.
Accompanying these “loud” pastiches, each of which sound, like so much
contemporary theater music, as if they were created by a machine programmed to
connect the dots, are the well-intentioned dances which both children and
adults perform as if they have been robotized. While they certainly leap about
with great energy, there seems to be no joy in their gyrations. Only the
Wormwoods, she with her dancing partner Rudolpho (Phillip Spaeth), he in his
rubbery legged motions within striped lime-green pants, seem to have any
“choreographical” fun. But they are given only few painful moments to display
their obviously insignificant and totally selfish “gestures.”
Matilda, whether she is telling “loudly voiced” (at times even shouted)
stories to her local and saintly librarian or suffering the attacks of Miss
Trunchbull and her own family members, almost gets abused out of existence. The
only moment, until the musical lurches to its suddenly happy end, that she is
allowed to express any joy is when the tender Miss Honey asks to be her friend,
to which she responds with a big hug. Beyond that, she is just a figurehead, a brilliant
young girl at whom nearly everyone else yells in derision, as they might a
bullied “nerd.” Even poor Annie, of the musical of that name, got more love and
attention from her evil headmistress, than does Matilda.
It is not, however, that Matilda, as its makers have argued, is a “dark”
work, as much as it is an empty one. While Annie, at least, had “tomorrow” to
look forward, Matilda is amazingly unflappable, committed to her reading and
thinking as mindlessly as Miss Trunchbull is committed to her hate and torture
of her young students. Despite their thoughtless machinations, I think I’d
prefer to live with the Wormwoods than with the fantasy-spinning, slightly
holier-than-everyone Matilda. But, obviously, there is no living with anyone in
this tale, since each character is nothing more than a cardboard, cartoonish
type. Even the gentle Miss Honey lives out life in a shed instead of a
Indeed, despite the work’s pretense of siding with the small and quiet
Matilda, this musical advocates the loud and large—which may hint why all the
girls both in front and back of me as well as latitudinally seated, watched
throughout with sacks of candy on their laps. Having seen the movie or read the
book, did they comprehend that fat was better than thin, loud better than
quiet?
So desperate to be loved was Dennis Kelly’s and Tim Minchin’s work, that
at one moment near the work’s end, the stage suddenly burst out—apparently in
response to the downfall of Miss Trunchbull—into a shower of strobe lights,
while green lasers shot out across the ceiling of the uncomfortable Schubert
balcony. “Awesome,” shouted out a child in the audience, one of the few truly
spontaneous moments in this determined parable! It was at that point I had to
admit to myself that this was simply not a work created for the likes of me—nor
for my two dazed neighbors, who together with me made our way grumpily back
into the crowded mid-town streets.
“Why do you think,” asked the wife, “this got such remarkably positive
reviews?” “I don’t know,” I responded, “but it might have something to do with
the fact that this has not exactly been a particularly stellar Broadway season.
Reviewers have to like something.”
Two more plays closed the next day, but am I sure that Matilda will play on for
years!
Los Angeles, May 9, 2013
Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (June
2013).
