The music strives for a British tone but keeps reverting to American pop idioms, Shaiman and Wittman’s strong suit. The production plays fast and loose with the period (the Dickensian poverty of Charlie and his family shifts unexpectedly to today’s computer age with pit stops to what vaguely looks like the 1950s and the 1970s), and the score follows suit, never settling on an era or even a genre. Shaiman and Wittman still seem to be trying on styles, skipping from patter numbers to traditional ballads to rap eruptions. PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures by The Times What could possibly go wrong with such a top-notch crew? And Douglas Hodge, the versatile British actor who won a Tony for his flamboyantly affecting performance in the Broadway revival of “La Cage Aux Folles,” stars as the captivatingly mad Willy Wonka. Peter Darling, the man who set “Matilda” and “Billy Elliot: The Musical” in distinctive motion, choreographed. The staging is by Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes, whose diverse body of work (including the films “American Beauty” and “Skyfall” and the musicals “Cabaret” and “Gypsy”) you’d assume would have equipped him for Dahl’s distinctive blend of one part sweet, two parts sour. The score of this newly minted show is by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, the Tony-winning songwriting duo who made “Hairspray” the most compulsively danceable show to come around this young century. It’s that with so many dab hands involved the material was bound to be born anew. It’s not just that the novel held a greater place in my childhood affections, though it did. Quite frankly, I was prepared to love “Charlie” more. Now “Matilda” for me didn’t quite live up to the transcendent hype promulgated on both sides of the Atlantic. Making matters more invidious, the show pales in comparison to the current Dahl hit drawing crowds in London and New York, “Matilda the Musical.”
Charlie chocolate factory album movie#
This innocuous production, which begins with a tongue-in-cheek documentary on the history of chocolate, lacks the tangy originality of “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,” the classic 1971 movie starring Gene Wilder as the half-demented candy man spinning sugar into gluttonous fantasy.