The Witches

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For starters, The Witches is a wonderful show. Feeling like everything you wish the Willy Wonka stage adaptation would be, it relishes in camp, pantomime, and sincerity, with its cartoonish but respectable costumes and lavish set. Seriously, the set will blow you away, what starts as a quite simple home backdrop is revealed to be just the front for a grand (and as deep as it is wide) hotel with different pieces for a check in desk, rooms, kitchen, ballroom, doors, dining table, spa lockers... The list of lovely set pieces goes on and on, revealing themselves one after another via the giant turntable. Just when you think you've seen all the locations in this show- BAM! new set!

The costumes strike a lovely balance of silly and perfectly good at representing the book itself and the tone of Roald Dahl's work. A friend said it was very Wes Anderson like, and I absolutely agree that's the best way to describe it in palette and the vague 70's-ness of it all. The remote control mice were a stand out favorite, as they dart between different dressers and tables where the actors in mouse costumes pop out of drawers and from under box lids in a very convincing illusion. The timing was simply impressive!

But the question on everyone’s mind is, is it worthy of its status as a Malloysical?

It is difficult for the show to shake the gut response of “Malloy does Matilda”, and it feels the show itself has leaned into it. Many of the songs are average, but catchy and well-done, the witches themselves get some wonderfully dark and dissonant pieces. A couple in there (Heartbeat Duet and Gran’s When I was Young come to mind) that are truly haunting enough to deserve their place in Malloysical canon. But where the show falls flat is at it’s eleventh hour number, Get Up, which out of all of them feels the most at war with itself. This is the song used to advertise the show and was filmed and posted to YouTube, and it feels like it was tailored specifically for that purpose. While the intro verses and the chorus background certainly has some interesting ideas in there that tie into the show’s themes, the overall message feels trite and cliche, and the song catchy but lacking anything specific ane memorable. Though I do think that a slight arrangement and change to the song's choreo and staging would have done wonders already.

Add onto it the staging of these hilarious costumes of the children turned into objects by witches, which I do adore don’t get me wrong, but surely they don’t restrict the children’s movement nearly as much as the total lack of choreography implies. That is a common theme here, while the two front runners Luke and Bruno are given plenty to do, the show seems unable to trust any of the supporting children’s ensemble with any big dancing moments. Compare this to Matilda, where Revolting Children is a glorious celebration and exhibition of the talent of the young ensemble. I believe there are seven supporting/ensemble children here, compared to the dozen or so ensemble adults who fill every choreo number of theirs with excitement and revelry in the celebration of campy showbiz.

There are only a couple plot and thematic notes I think would strengthen the piece. For one I find it strange that we see Luke interact with his parents before they die. This was not so in the book, the accompanying song serves nothing to further any of the themes later. The whole scene seems like a commonplace formality, surely we must introduce the family with a happy and painfully dramatically ironic song before they die, how else will the unsuspecting audience get that gut punch? Clearly it’s not required, however, another popular children’s authors, albeit for a bit older audience, Lemony Snicket never shows his orphan’s parents alive. You don’t get any idea of who they even were as people until much later. The Witches here could take a page from that book, revealing the sudden news of a car crash in the middle of a cheery childhood activity.

But those two conclude my only major gripes. A little strengthening of the heartbeat themes and a little reworking to what is supposed to be their flagship song. My main hope is that any American transfer doesn’t lay a finger on the humor, since the British dryness is absolutely needed for the tone of the book and it’s definitely where the work shines. Maybe a couple little reference changes here and there, as some jokes did make a lot more sense with my British mutual there to explain them, but I think it should be done VERY sparingly.

Unfortunately, I don't think this show will be very popular among Malloysical fans. But I love it. And I think a wider group of people will get to enjoy it to! It's just a fun show. It's a very good example of how to do this sort of extravagance correctly while still holding time for some of the more intense moments. Plus the design is just incredible.

I sincerely hope we get a cast album, a UK tour, maybe even an off-Broadway run with a tour.