Musical Reviews - Matilda - When I Grow Up...

I know there's been a gap between posts, but I had to finish an assignment for Uni by last night so a lot of my time with a computer has been spent doing that. Suffice to say, don't EVER take study away on a holiday with you. Or if you do, make sure you'll have somewhere to do it easily. I didn't have much choice, as I need to finish these two subjects this semester, but trying to write a Business Law assignment after you've spent 5-6 hours walking around London/Vienna is pretty friggen difficult. I've got another one due on Friday but it's shorter and hopefully there'll be a bit of room on the train to do it tomorrow.

Oh wait, I said that about the plane...

But this post isn't to bitch about my many retarded life decisions. I want to share with you something that happened to me the other day in London.

Jus and I went out on Thursday night and saw Matilda the Musical on the West End at the Cambridge Theatre.

First, some backstory. I came to London once before, in 2000. I'd just spent 2 weeks touring Singapore, Germany and France with the Australian Youth Wind Orchestra. I was a poor little uni student, and I'd just spent a lot of my parents money on a soprano saxophone, but I managed to find the cash to see two shows on the West End. Those that know me know well my love of musical theatre. One of the shows I saw was Lés Miserables, as it was the first musical I remember really seeing (I actually think I saw Pinafore first, but that's besides the point.) The other was The Lion King. Seeing The Lion King is, to this day, one of the top five musical experiences I have ever had. I didn't realise a stage production could work like that, both familiar and still new, staged like Disney had mated with Picasso. The music to the film is relatively forgettable, but Robert Elhai, David Metzger, and Bruce Fowler managed to make it feel like Elton John had just had one of Paul Simon's African Awakenings. I believe it is coming back to Sydney next year, and if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend. Anyway, what does this have to do with Matilda I hear you ask?

Seeing The Lion King is probably the last truly amazing musical experience I had. Until Thursday night. Words can't really describe my reaction to Matilda. It touched me somewhere deep down, in a manner I didn't think music still could. Tim Minchin, the Australian singer/comedian, and Dennis Kelly have created a show that left me simply speechless by it's beauty. They've adapted Roald Dahl's 1988 Book about the girl from a damaged family who escapes through stories in the most imaginative manner possible, channeling Sondheim, Bernstein, and Schonberg. And both the children and the adults in the audience enjoyed the hell out of it, strange considering so much of it involves people singing and acting out abuse to children. It's very easy to see how it cleaned up at the Olivier awards this year, and I fully expect it to do the same next year at the Tonys after it runs on Broadway.

Great music uplifts, and great musicals take you to a different place for the 2.5 hours you sit in an uncomfortable theatre chair, with the temperature just that little bit too hot so you sweat in places you don't like to sweat, and the person behind you coughs loudly or doesn't get all the jokes (although, at least in London you can take your booze in with you.) Great musicals draw you away, into another world where it seems completely natural for someone to sing about something as prosaic as walking down the street in the rain, or something as damaging as losing a child in 19th Century France. My favourite musicals do just this: Les Mis, Into the Woods, West Side Story, all do this in some way. So When I stood during the bows twice, once for the young girl who played the titular character (the large cast of children made the show even more special) and a second time for the whole cast, I meant every clap. The emotion within me was visceral, and I literally had tears coming down my cheeks. I'm not ashamed to say this. It also wasn't the first time during the show, as it got very dusty at the beginning of the 2nd Act when the children sing the song "When I Grow Up."

Matilda, at it's heart, is a story about how stories change our lives. For me, it may just have done that.

RaC