The Royal Shakespeare Company’s musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “Matilda” rushes at you from the stage of the Shubert Theatre—often literally—with the relentlessness of a high-speed rail train. Director Matthew Warchus’ meticulously calculated production offers coup after coup de théâtre as it tells Dahl’s fantastical tale of a 5-year-old girl who’s a genius, the idiot family that mistreats her, the sadistic headmistress who terrorizes her, and the loving teacher who comes to her aid. The show is strenuously entertaining, as dark as it is funny, and just a tad cold.
Matilda Wormwood lives unhappily with a slack-jawed older brother and twin boobs for parents, a crooked used-car-salesman father and a tango-competition-obsessed mother, who bemoan the fact that their daughter is always reading. But Matilda’s not just consuming picture books; she’s busy going through Dickens, Dostoevsky, and more, guided at first by the Caribbean-flavored local librarian, Mrs. Phelps, and then by Matilda’s first schoolteacher, the young and lovely Miss Honey. Her arch nemesis is Agatha Trunchbull, the school’s abusive leader, who calls children
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