THB #286: Matilda - The Musical Movie

Full Disclosure: I love “Matilda the Musical,” which I saw on Broadway multiple times and then with the touring company in Los Angeles. So I come to this with a certain bias and, as happens with critics, too much awareness of the source material that I have already chewed over before getting to the thing that is in front of me to assess.

I wonder… did Netflix pull a Chapek by unceremoniously dumping what they call Roald Dahl’s Matilda The Musical onto the service on Christmas Day with little advertising, little promotion, no awards push at all, and screening just enough to get 64 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing? (Glass Onion has 317.)

There are, in my opinion, a few major mistakes in the conversion of this show that won 5 Tonys and 7 Oliviers. But the magic of the show still emerges from this adaptation, which amazingly, while directed by the stage director, never feels like an opened-up stage show. The movie is playing in theaters in the U.K., where the show is still play…