The Australian production of Matilda the Musical has touched down in Auckland and it's been worth the wait, says theatre critic Paul Simei-Barton.
Matilda The Musical simply gobbles up a reviewer's superlatives - sensationally theatrical, magically enthralling, outrageously funny but also wickedly grotesque and deeply moving.
Seven years after it emerged from the Royal Shakespeare Company's workshops, the multi-award winning and staggeringly successful phenomenon has (finally) reached our shores as an Australian touring
production.
So many elements must coalesce to make a winning musical, it is difficult to identify what sets Matilda apart. For starters there are the children. Real children: spiky, belching, nose-picking, squirming, wild, revolting children - with revolting rhymes. To see these complex and demanding roles absolutely nailed by a gaggle of pint-sized prodigies is truly amazing.
Then there's the story-telling genius of Roald Dahl who is always instinctively on the side of the underdog but refuses to pity the victims of bullying. His stories demand action while stubbornly insisting our greatest resource against tyranny is the power of an unbridled imagination.
The 70-year-old Dahl wrote Matilda in gloriously grumpy-old-man mode and the show delivers a blistering satire on the crass, shallow, hedonistic, TV-addicted nightmare of contemporary British culture.
