Anticipation for the opening of the hit British musical Matilda the Musical in New York ran high this past April. PLSN caught the show a few days after it officially opened, and there were two long lines snaking around the corner to get in. And the lavish musical did not disappoint. Inspired by the Roald Dahl book of the same name, it depicts the life of five year-old genius girl Matilda Wormwood, who must cope with a loud, boorish family and a repressive school environment that mock and deride her high level of intelligence, her creativity and her desire to learn more.
The lights in her life are her teacher Miss Honey, who herself feels held back in her own life, and Mrs. Phelps, the school librarian, who always sits enthralled by the ever-growing yarn that Matilda weaves with words during their times together. Given that this is a Dahl work being adapted for the stage, there is menace to balance with the mirth, and the show strikes a good balance between drama and humor.
The show has since racked up 12 Tony nominations and won three, including Best Scenic Design of a Musical (Rob Howell) and Best Lighting Design of a Musical (Hugh Vanstone). The third Tony nod was for Best Featured Actor in a Musical, for Gabriel Ebert, who performed as Mr. Wormwood.
Howell has been with the show since it first gestated in England and made it to the West End in 2011, and he had a lot to take on. Beyond about a dozen set pieces in Matilda, large alphabet tiles drape, hang over and spread out from the stage. “There are more in New York than there are in London, and that’s because I used the tiles to rebalance this theater to the right scale for our story, our kids and our adults,” Howell told PLSN. “We don’t want the stage [to be] as wide as the proscenium arch is at the Shubert Theatre, so I’ve used the tiles to bring down the width of the proscenium. I didn’t need to do that in London, because the proscenium arch is narrower, so I spent more tiles recalibrating the space here. The set is bigger in New York in order to make the stage feel smaller.”
Why tiles? As Howell explained, a wooden alphabet tile has the same value for a child as it does for an adult. “It’s completely leveling, and the potential for it to be the beginning, middle or an end of a word is exactly the same for me as it is for a child as it is for somebody much, much older than me,” said the designer. “All of the locations that we go to are similarly not from the viewpoint of a child and not from the viewpoint of an adult. They’re naturalistic in a storybook way.”
Fast and Furious
The set pieces include the school (interior and exterior spaces), the Wormwood residence (including Matilda’s bedroom), Miss Honey’s small, sparse flat and a large birthday party table. The changes often come fast and furious. “There are a lot of scenes,” concurred Howell. “I hope that the audience doesn’t feel exhausted by the amount of stuff that’s going on. It was just the way that it was written. We needed in some way to make a scenic gesture for all of those locations.”
These days, Broadway audiences have come to expect a lot of turnover and visual razzle-dazzle in high-tech, big-budget musicals. But one does not need to cram the stage with props to show where characters are located. “There are probably 12 different specific locations, but then we also are comfortable using a space as it is with nothing in it,” stated Howell. “In the schoolyard, we don’t do very much at all. There’s a small piece in the back, but we don’t urgently throw scenery into the space. I hope it’s focused enough that we don’t need it.”
Almost every set piece that comes downstage slides in on tracks. The school gates arrive via a cross space track, and the school desks and doll’s house come up through the floor, as does a small lift elevating Matilda a few feet during the song “Quiet” in Act II. Everything else is picked up from above on a track with a floating slider.
Howell said that the most challenging scenic change was getting in and out of the school room. “There are nine desks and a blackboard, and trying to make that an elegant scene change was a primary concern to me,” he explained. “The school gates were a puzzle — anybody can get them on, but they had to be solid enough to climb all over and had to open and close. It was a lot to be asked, technically, in the engineering of those things. The sliders look after themselves really. They’re not too troublesome.”
Children vs. Puppets
Howell revealed that a lot of workshops were done for Matilda. Surprisingly, director Matthew Warchus and his team were not sure if they were going to use children in the show. Puppets were experimented with. The idea of dressing adults in masks and headdresses for a larger-than-real life look was considered. “We tried lots of different ways of playing with scale, and over the course of all of that is when the language for the piece started to develop,” recalled Howell. “It would’ve been a very different show if, for instance, we had used puppets. As we were trying to work out how to tackle the fundamental issue — it’s a story about a five-year-old girl who’s going to be on stage for over two hours and carry the show — all of the rest of the language for the production started to develop.”
On top of his duties as scenic designer, Howell also created costumes for the show. While in the States there are usually different designers for sets and costumes, in his native England it is the norm for the two disciplines to be tackled by one person. “The thing I get asked most about when I’m in New York is the curiosity about why the Brits do both.” For him, it’s just natural. “Whenever I see a show that has two or three different designers on it, I think I can tell. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I think I can tell that it’s the same world [that] instead of having gone through one filter has gone through two or three different filters.” It just seems natural to him that one would want to have the same creative source behind, for instance, the fabric in a character’s suit and a sofa he is sitting on, as well as having an eye for how that sofa would fit into a specific room.
Dynamic Lighting
Part of what adds to Howell’s sets for Matilda is the dynamic lighting of Hugh Vanstone. For instance, the scenery outside of the school is sometimes illuminated in a bluish light, while the swing set sequence is bathed in green. “Hugh has done an amazing job,” declared Howell. “He always does, but I think this is spectacular work from him.”
Color contrasts play a crucial role in Howell’s costuming. The drab, gray school outfits that Matilda and her peers are forced to wear fit in with the repressive environment created by headmistress Miss Trunchbull, and conversely, the obnoxiously brash clothes and hairstyles sported by Matilda’s ignorant family, not to mention the wacky color scheme of their furniture, could be considered equally stifling (if entertaining) due to their metaphorical significance.
“They’re vulgar, they’re meaningless,” stressed Howell. “There is no sobriety to them at all. Mrs. Wormwood has a line in ‘Loud’ that it’s not a matter of what you know, it’s the volume with which you express what you don’t know. That is such a clever line, and it’s true.” He added: “Some of the other locations are more colorful and you could say more playful than the school, but we needed Matilda to have a sober center to her life, and that’s why the color distribution is as it is.
We want the school to feel like an uncomfortable place, so it can’t be a brightly colored polo shirt school or sweat pants and sneakers type school. It has to be a school that’s tough to be at, because those are the rules. If we did another version of the school, Miss Trunchbull would have no value whatsoever.”
Matilda is an elaborate, briskly paced show full of visual pizzazz and energy emanating from the titular character (alternately played by four different girls at individual performances), the child cast as well as Bertie Carvel hamming it up in drag as Miss Trunchbull. The younger cast members certainly left an impression on Howell. “I was just reminded that working with kids is complex for everybody, but it’s just wonderful the whole time.” Planning for the show may be tricky, and kids may be sensitive about certain things due to their young age, but once one gets past those issues, noted the designer, “they are a fantastic reservoir of energy for everybody else.”
Reach Bryan Reesman at bryan@plsn.com
