This week on Thursday and Friday, the middle school put on their production of Matilda Jr., based on Roald Dahl’s 1988 book.
The original book follows Matilda Wormwood, a young prodigy who teaches herself to read and is born into a family that is obsessed with watching TV and looks down on her bibliophilia. Because of this, Mr. Wormwood sends Matilda off to boarding school to set her straight. The headmistress, Agatha Trunchbull, does not take kindly to Matilda’s intelligence and tries to keep her in the bottom class where she is not challenged. This leads to her unused potential manifesting into mind powers which she uses to scare Trunchbull out of town and force her to give the year-one teacher her house back. Matilda moves in with her teacher, finding her own family neglectful.
The middle school is putting on a musical adaptation of this story written by Dennis Kelly and composed by Tim Minchin. This musical features the same songs from the Matilda musical on Netflix.
The show featured Isabelle Beitler as Matilda, Annabelle Dutra as Miss Honey (Matilda’s teacher), and Chloe Hamilton as Trunchbull. Chloe Hamilton commented, “Her personality was so fun to play.”
Everyone who worked on the production seemed to have lots of fun. Eli Smock, the student director, said, “I like working with the drama community a lot. The music is also kinda fire.”
The crew worked hard on the production. The light crew used a projector to draw on the tarp being used as the black board which would also become translucent to display the acrobat and escapologist scenes. Along with that, the sound crew did an A+ job. Maxx Cooper, the operator for soundboard two, said “…controlling the secondary soundboard is difficult because you don’t really get the time to adjust the volume on people where on the first soundboard you have the more main characters so you can fiddle with it because you get more time to fiddle with it.”
The audience also seemed to be quite pleased with the performance. Addie Prindeville, an audience member, commented, “I like all of the different lights that are going on and I love the music too. It’s very fun and impressive.” Connor Anderson, another audience member, added “I thought there was a lot of very good acting. I thought it was cool how some of them were doing cartwheels and backflips. Overall a very good play. Shout out to Cam Anderson in the sixth grade chorus.”
