Thirteen years after his death, Roald Dahl is enjoying a theatrical comeback.
In London, the “Hairspray” team of MarcShaiman and Scott Wittman areworking on “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” The $10 million Sam Mendes-directed musical opens there in June.
And here in New York, “Matilda,” adapted from another Dahl classic, is in previews, opening April 11 at the Shubert. Directed by Matthew Warchus, the musical is already an early favorite to sweep the Tonys.
I say “comeback” because in 1954 Dahl wrote a play — adapting some of his sinister short stories, including “Lamb to the Slaughter,” about a woman who kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb, into a thriller called “The Honeys.”
It opened in New York the following year. But the reviews were chillier than that frozen leg of lamb, and it closed a month later. Dahl never wrote for the theater again.
Jump ahead 50 years: Tim Minchin, a writer and composer working in children’s theater in Australia, needed material for a new show and remembered “Matilda” — the story of a girlwith telekinetic powers and hateful parents. Minchin wrote the Dahl estate about the rights, and he was asked about his score. “I didn’t have one,” he recalls. “I was working for obscure children’s theaters in Australia. You write some songs, maybe get paid $500, and that’s it. I never followed up. I think I was put off by how seriously they took my request.”
The Royal Shakespeare Company thought “Matilda” might make a good musical, and it snapped up “Matilda” four years ago and commissioned playwright Dennis Kelly to write the book. Warchus came on boardand asked Minchin, nowone of England’s hottest comedians and songwriters, to do the score.
“I launched into a monologue about how to do it,”Minchin says. “I said youcould f – – k up badly if you made it too Disney. You have to keep Dahl’s darker, rougher edges. We’ve already got a 9-year-old girl at the center of the story. That’s enough sugar.”
Kelly was on the same page. “To be honest with you, I’m pretty nasty myself. And Tim has a nasty side as well, so we never considered toning it down.’’
The villain in “Matilda” is Agatha Trunchbull, the headmistress atMatilda’s school. Trunchbull, gleefully played by British actor Bertie Carvel, enjoys picking up girls by their pigtails and hurling them across the playing field. Kellyand Minchin were determined to keep that scene in their musical.
While writing “Matilda,” they made a pilgrimage to Dahl’s estate, the elegant Gipsy House, in Great Missenden, England. Dahl, they discovered, always wrote in a shabby shed behind the house — which has been kept exactly as it was when he used it.
“The walls are stained with nicotine,” Kelly says. “And there was no heat. When he got cold, he bundled up in a sleeping bag . . . He kept the windows shut. It was if he wanted to be alone with his imagination.”
Dahl kept mementos of his childhood in the shed, including model airplanes and a little metal sphere he made fromthe foil he saved from the chocolates he ate as a child. The wrappings were made from lead, so the ball is heavy. “You can kill someone with it,” Kelly says.
Dahl wrote sitting in a dirty old arm chair whose cushion he hollowed out so he could sink into it. That’s how the WWII fighter pilot relieved his chronic back pain, a result of a crash landing in the Lybian desert. Memories of the war no doubt fueled those darkand sinister touches in his stories.
Though “Matilda” certainly hopes to attract family audiences, Minchin and Kelly have tried to maintain its edge and grotesqueness. Don’t expect the sun to come out tomorrow. “We don’t want the genre of musical theater to eliminate Dahl’s darkness, ”Minchin says. “Dahl never condescended to his readers, and I don’t think ‘Matilda’ condescends to its audiences. You’re not going to hear the same tune plugged five times during the show.”