“Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical” — an unwieldy title but a better one, surely, than “Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical: The Movie” — is an enjoyably bright and chipper adaptation of a moving, melancholy story I’ve loved since childhood. I wasn’t alone; I imagine “Matilda” was catnip for a lot of bookish kids with latent Anglophile tendencies and dreams of overthrowing their bullies and escaping humdrum reality.
More grounded and less outlandish than some of the author’s other juvenile fiction, Dahl’s 1988 novel tells of a child genius in a small English village who’s blessed with the kind of extraordinary brainpower that can change the world. It’s spawned a few adaptations already, including an entertaining if bluntly Americanized 1996 film and a justly popular Olivier- and Tony-winning musical that has now directly inspired this new movie.
All that aside, there may be something inherently contradictory about any filmed version of “Matilda,” since the novel itself is something of a children’s cautionary tale about the perils of too much TV watching. (The same logic surely applies to too much Netflix, where this bouncy, bright-colored adaptation will begin streaming Dec. 25, after a brief theatrical run.)
