I decided it was time to go back to Times Square and do another look at what is hot on Broadway now, and some reviews of top Broadway musicals...
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!”
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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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