SMT 6 (3) pp.

355–362 Intellect Limited 2012

Studies in Musical Theatre

Volume 6 Number 3
© 2012 Intellect Ltd ReAct. English language. doi: 10.1386/smt.6.3.355_1

Laura MacDonald
University of Groningen

‘Sometimes you have to

make a little bit of mischief’:
Matthew Warchus’ hybrid
approach to musical theatre
directing1

Abstract Keywords
While the contemporary musical theatre adaptations Matilda (2010) and Ghost Matilda
(2011) share a director, Matthew Warchus, and also have designers in common, Ghost
their critical reception and grosses have been markedly different. With a pop score Matthew Warchus
and special effects demonstrating the latest innovations in scenic and video design adaptation
for the theatre, and based on a popular Hollywood film, Ghost was much maligned Broadway
from its inception. While it continues to run in London’s West End, it shuttered West End
after a brief season in New York. Meanwhile, Broadway is breathless in anticipation
of the quirky, family-friendly literary adaptation Matilda. This article traces the
development of these musicals through opposing production models – the risk of the
commercial production and the relative security of the state-subsidized theatre –
and explores how one director’s range and hybridity is bridging an increasingly 1. I am grateful to Bryan
polarized musical theatre industry. A survey of critical responses in London and Vandevender for his
valuable comments
New York, along with analysis of directing, acting and design will help to illustrate and suggestions as I
why Warchus shuttles so regularly across the Atlantic, and between subsidized and developed this article.
commercial theatre.

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Laura MacDonald

2. Producer Cameron Journalists and critics are bemused by director Matthew Warchus’
Mackintosh supports
this assessment and
range, as represented by his most recent musical theatre direction, of
has previously stated, Matilda (2010), ‘a quirky public-sector British effort’, and Ghost (2011),
To create a show
‘a commercial stage version of the Patrick Swayze/Demi Moore weepie’
on Broadway, (McGinn 2011). Both musicals were simultaneously in development for
which is something several years as Warchus worked closely with their shared creative teams,
I’ve never done
and never will do, but Matilda was originally produced in November 2010 by the subsi-
would cost me dized Royal Shakespeare Company, and Ghost in March 2011 by a team
nearly twice as of commercial producers. Matilda features the energy of a cast full of chil-
much money as
doing it in London. dren, a colourful set and ironic lyrics, while Ghost is darker and full of griev-
The rule of thumb ing and scheming characters singing power ballads. Musicals like Ghost,
is that a show that
costs £5 million to
which cling to memorable elements of their familiar sources – in this case a
put on in London sensual, paranormal pottery scene and the Righteous Brothers’ ‘Unchained
would probably Melody’ – are chastised for replicating rather than innovating. Musicals like
cost you $10-12
million to create in Matilda, which introduce new talent, improve upon their source material
New York. and in general exceed expectations, are lauded for their innovations and for
(Kantor 2003) further developing the musical theatre genre. How can a director who leads
the production of the former also be responsible for the latter, and in the
same theatre season?
Warchus’ career has been eclectic since he graduated from the University
of Bristol in 1988. He has directed productions ranging from Shakespeare to
Fiddler on the Roof to The Alchemist at regional theatres, the National Theatre,
the West End and on Broadway. Consistently singled out for his ‘populism
plus genuine artistic rigour’, Warchus’ versatility, as demonstrated by Ghost
and Matilda, reflects his admitted interests in both spectacle and emotional
intensity (McGinn 2011). ‘I try to find a way of making the relationships
between characters in a musical really count, and try to encourage a style
that is an unusual hybrid of interior and exterior’, Warchus explains when
discussing his earlier direction of a revival of Follies on Broadway. ‘The inte-
rior is absolute truth and documentary reality and emotion – authenticity and
intensity – and the exterior is about abstraction – poetic imagery and specta-
cle’ (interview in Lundskaer-Nielsen 2008: 159). Ghost and Matilda feature a
hybrid of emotional and technical pyrotechnics, but also feature the input of
a team of collaborators Warchus has worked with for more than fifteen years.
The shorthand Warchus has developed with his collaborators has supported
the creation and production of both musicals, as has the ‘less pressurized’
environment of theatre production Warchus indicates he has experienced in
London (quoted in Hemley 2012).
Broadway’s high costs raise the stakes for new musical production. ‘The
spotlight on you is a brighter, harsher light, and that can create an insecurity
in artists when they are trying to put together something’, Warchus notes.
‘They are very conscious of trying to chase and please the audience’, while
the West End’s lower costs offer protection and a greater sense of freedom, he
explains (quoted in Hemley 2012).2 Warchus has consequently had the oppor-
tunity to take risks in London, and rebound after a failure such as The Lord of
the Rings, which lost £12 million in 2007. Such career progression after a musi-
cal flop was possible on Broadway decades ago when out-of-town tryouts
were a cost-effective mode of new musical development, and developing
artists were given second chances. Warchus’ balance between showmanship
and drama, in London’s failure-forgiving West End, might be read as a throw-
back to Harold Prince’s frequently innovative but audience-pleasing musical
theatre direction of the 1960s and 1970s.

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 ‘Sometimes you have to make a little bit of mischief’

Prince’s visually striking musicals owed much to his close collaboration

with designers such as Boris Aronson, responsible for the inverted mirror
reflecting Cabaret’s audience in 1966, the elevators and platforms framing
Bobby’s Manhattan in Company (1970) and Follies’ (1971) haunted theatre.
These designs reflected and supported Prince’s directorial concept for each
musical. Like Warchus, Prince sought to engage audiences with his stag-
ing, beyond merely offering entertainment. His staging expressed characters’
struggles with politics, relationships, identity and ambition. But while these
musicals have been labelled concept musicals, the Prince of Broadway was
a conceptual showman, and composer Jason Robert Brown emphasizes the
director’s desire to ensure audiences enjoyed an entertaining as well as an
emotional experience. ‘He wants to make sure that when they’ve spent their
money they can see everything on the stage’, Brown explains. ‘Everything
that he did was always about making sure that everyone was going to feel
like they got a total experience in the theater’ (quoted in Bryer and Davison
2005: 29). Matilda, based on a novel written episodically by Roald Dahl, has
a moment-to-moment narrative not unlike that of Evita, brought together by
Prince’s cinematic staging. Like Ghost, Evita was criticized for its pop score
and mixed media visual spectacle, but enjoyed long runs in London and New
York because audiences embraced these same elements. Where Prince sought
intelligent Boston audiences to try out and further develop musicals such as
Company and Follies, Warchus-directed musicals Matilda and Ghost (devel-
oped in Stratford-upon-Avon and Manchester, respectively) were embraced
by London audiences prior to Broadway openings. Ghost’s and Matilda’s jour-
neys to Broadway are thus not part of any British invasion, but rather the
culmination of UK-based development and creation.
Based on popular children’s author Dahl’s novel about a spunky little girl
with extraordinary talents, Matilda opened in December 2010 as a family-
friendly Christmas show, and was the final production on the thrust-stage of
the RSC’s temporary Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Australian
comedian Tim Minchin was commissioned to write the songs, and contem-
porary British playwright Dennis Kelly the book. Ghost opened a few months
later in Manchester, prior to a July 2011 opening in London. It features lyrics
and a book adapted by Bruce Joel Rubin from his original screenplay about a
ghost trying to save and protect the woman he left behind. The Eurythmics’
Dave Stewart and popular music songwriter Glen Ballard contributed
music and lyrics. The combination of a contemporary rock score and illu-
sions recreating the supernatural special effects of the film were expected to
entrance audiences as much as the tragic love story.

Kaleidoscopic frenzy onstage

In his review of Matilda, critic Michael Billington described how the direction
‘keeps the stage a riot of kaleidoscopic activity’ (2010). Throughout the musi-
cal, the staging expands and contracts, from the diminutive Matilda angry
at her parents and alone in her bedroom, to a riotous classroom of revolt-
ing children, performing Peter Darling’s often circular choreography on all
three sides of the theatre’s thrust stage. This intimate and engaging staging
was maintained when the musical transferred to the Cambridge Theatre in
London’s West End in late 2011, as if to reconstruct the Courtyard’s stage
behind the proscenium. The cascade of coloured, lettered tiles surrounding
the proscenium and extending upstage, along with busy chalkboards, created

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Laura MacDonald

an intimate playing space with depth but no static set, as had Rob Howell’s
wild and curling tree branches extending past the proscenium in his earlier
collaboration with Warchus, The Lord of the Rings. Similarly to the hydrau-
lics creating the landscape of Middle-earth, in Matilda set pieces such as
school desks rose from the stage floor, though on a much smaller scale. The
Wormwood family’s lounge efficiently transforms into Matilda’s bedroom, all
within the same colourful frame. Both musicals often reverted to the simple
playing space of a bare stage, to be filled with characters telling their stories
in quieter, emotional moments, as when Matilda’s warm and loving teacher
Miss Honey invites her student for tea at her humble home in an old shed.
Like Cabaret in 1966, Matilda self-reflexively engages with Matilda’s
passion for reading and storytelling to tell her story. She sings:

Just because I find myself in this story,

It doesn’t mean that everything is written for me.
If I think the ending is fixed already,
I might as well be saying I think that it’s OK,
And that’s not right!
(Kelly and Minchin 2010)

As Sally Bowles advised spectators to put down the knitting, the book and
the broom, in order to blow their horns and hear the band, Matilda advocates
for protagonists’ agency in the telling of their own story, exclaiming ‘Nobody
but me is going to change my story’. Her classmates climb up a scaffold of
letters, literally engaging with the means of storytelling, as Howell’s design
brought theatregoers into a world of letters, books and libraries – not unlike
Aronson’s set design bringing theatregoers into the Kit Kat Club. When
Matilda tells a story to her local librarian Mrs Phelps in serial instalments,
her characters emerge and create the world of the story around Matilda as
she enthrals her avid listener. Some of Matilda’s storytelling involves being
naughty, as when she lies to her headmistress Miss Trunchbull in order to
give a classmate an alibi, and change his story.
Warchus developed Matilda over several years with Minchin and Kelly,
but his longer-term collaborators are set and costume designer Howell, light-
ing designer Hugh Vanstone, choreographer Darling and illusionist Paul
Kieve. Their combined visual artistry creates a rich frame, but the world of
Matilda is ultimately created by actors performing intimate scenes with great
conviction. Warchus’ blocking across the diagonals of the arena playing space
gives the staging a momentum, which occasionally carries the action into the
auditorium, but also draws the audience into the playing space, inviting spec-
tators to fill in the blanks in Matilda’s world for themselves, rather than watch
the kind of presentational and prescriptive performances on detailed, realistic
sets expected in much musical theatre production. This close relationship is
strongest when the second act opens with children sliding down an upstage
slide, and rushing forward to sail into the audience on swings. With no end
to their motion, and with the audience on the other side of the swings, this
simple staging asks spectators to join Matilda’s classmates and imagine, or
remember, the potential such hopeful swinging prompts. A combination of
adults and children perform as the children in Matilda, visualizing the growing
up they sing of, but at the same time, audiences are invited to see themselves
in the adult-sized children, and perhaps celebrate their own choices not to
grow up entirely.

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 ‘Sometimes you have to make a little bit of mischief’

Six months after Matilda premiered, Billington experienced another

Warchus production, Ghost, with set and video design by Rob Howell and Jon
Driscoll, ‘which graphically recreates the kaleidoscopic frenzy of Manhattan
life’ (Billington 2011). Billington’s second experience of Warchus’ work as a
kaleidoscope is not random, and a quick survey of earlier Warchus straight
theatre productions – Art (1996), Boeing-Boeing (2007), God of Carnage
(2008) – reveals a standard of especially lively blocking, albeit on more static
sets. Warchus has been likened to a ‘referee’ by actor Jeff Daniels, who starred
in God of Carnage, an apt description for a director whose staging brings to
mind athletes moving through strategic plays on sports fields or in arenas
(quoted in Healy 2009). The combination of athletic staging with Howell and
Driscoll’s moving screens of video projection in Ghost ‘feels like a film’, and
Warchus’ production thereby engages with the musical’s origins as a film in
a way most screen-to-stage adaptations do not (Billington 2011). When the
musical’s lovers, Molly and Sam, stand in their New York City loft, rapid video
projections of the city’s iconic landscape flash on the moveable screens fram-
ing them. They sing about being ‘Here Right Now’, and while the staging is
simple, like the characters in Matilda’s story coming to life around her in a
simple scene in the library, the frenetic video-as-set in Ghost, in combination
with Molly and Sam’s emotional song, achieves the hybrid interior–exterior
staging Warchus’ desires. Billington felt people in Ghost ‘were largely second-
ary to the optical pyrotechnics’ (2011), while Mark Shenton observed how
Warchus ‘magnificently marshals the spectacle that musicals traditionally
thrive on, yet colours it with the right emotional detail to offer a genuinely
involving and gripping entertainment’ (2011). In the London and Broadway
productions, critics noted ‘spectacular visual dynamism’ (Taylor 2011), ‘layers
of genuine feeling and real comedy all kept in constant forward motion’
(Shenton 2011), and that ‘Warchus keeps things moving at warp speed’
(Gerard 2012). Sitting in a darkened auditorium, one feels snapped into the
sparkling colour and movement of the onstage world. The spectacle was
made emotional as Vanstone’s lighting contributed to defining characters,
and Warchus engaged with the potential of Howell and Driscoll’s moving
video screens not just to shrink and enlarge the playing space, but thinking
like a film-maker to offer close-ups of a love scene, and long shots of New
York City, just as a film would. Dazzling as Ghost’s staging and effects are,
Warchus’ ability to craft compelling performances from his actors ultimately
offers audiences heightened emotion as thrilling as the visual spectacle fram-
ing the characters’ devastating romance.
Self-reflexive with film rather than storybooks, Warchus’ direction of Ghost
is similarly dynamic as in Matilda, and likewise benefits from his close collabo-
ration with set designer Howell. ‘Cinema-quality integration of elements that
they usually do in movie post-production, just editing the stuff together, we
do live every night’, Warchus proudly explains (quoted in Piepenburg 2012).
While the spectacular live music video experience the musical provides effec-
tively traces the source film’s cinematography and guides spectators through
Ghost’s (faithful to the film) narrative, Warchus insists that the actors provide
the ‘emotional heart of the drama’ (quoted in Piepenburg 2012). A particularly
memorable performance was given by Adebayo Bolaji as the subway ghost
Sam is trying to learn from. Despite the spectacular effects creating a subway
car in transit onstage, and with the subway ghost flying vertically and moving
through people, the actor’s intense performance drew the audience into the
small space of the subway car, his anguish becoming the core of the scene.

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Laura MacDonald

The result is a simultaneous experience of awe in response to the wizardry,

and sympathy for the troubled ghosts, a hybrid response to hybrid staging.

Notably insubstantial or extraordinary achievement

Warchus’ critics seem in doubt over whether there is a place for elaborate
special effects in a musical seeking to also offer an emotionally moving experi-
ence for audiences, but Warchus admits, ‘I get equally excited by great perform-
ers and by a new Vari-Lite that’s just come on the market’ (quoted in McGinn
2011). Trying to reconcile his highly regarded work directing plays, critics of
Ghost wondered if the gifted Warchus was ‘in search of the big money that
only big musicals can provide’ (Isherwood 2012), and suggested the musical
be sent to Las Vegas, ‘if not for the participation of veteran director Matthew
Warchus’ (Torre 2012). Ben Brantley of the New York Times tried ‘to justify the
involvement here of Mr. Warchus […], one of the smartest directors working’
(2011), while Matt Wolf of The Arts Desk called Ghost ‘notably insubstantial’
when compared ‘to that extraordinary achievement Matilda’ (2011).
Like many new musicals, Matilda and Ghost are based on much-loved
sources, and as suggested here, were directed with a similar approach by
Warchus, though the former was created at a state-subsidized theatre and
the latter with commercial producers. So long as Warchus collaborates with
esteemed companies, actors and writers, critics seem willing to forgive any
dalliance with unmemorable power ballads and large-scale spectacle. Is
Warchus, then, being a little bit naughty, working with the RSC yet maintain-
ing a ‘reputation as one of the top commercial, audience-friendly directors
of plays’ (Healy 2009)? ‘Sometimes you have to make a little bit of mischief’,
Matilda sings, wanting to change the story of her life (Kelly and Minchin
2010). Warchus, with his desire to take a hybrid approach to musical theatre
directing and his zeal for fantastic visual effects, seems to be making a bit of
mischief of his own in the history of musical theatre direction. When the musi-
cal opened on Broadway, Time magazine critic Richard Zoglin predicted the
musical would not be critically acclaimed, but refused to condemn it himself:

There are certain kinds of shows that simply have no chances with
Broadway’s tastemakers. Musicals based on hit Hollywood movies.
Popular stage successes from London that don’t have the imprimatur of
one of the tony institutional theaters, like the National or the Donmar
Warehouse. Shows with lavish special effects. Ghost pretty much covers
all the no-nos.
(2012)

Warchus admits, ‘When I was growing up in Yorkshire my treat to myself was

to go see Evita in Manchester. I gravitated to Spielberg and Andrew Lloyd
Webber long before I’d heard of Brecht. So it’s a reasonably fair reflection of
who I am’ (quoted in McGinn 2011). He nevertheless believes, ‘The time the
audience has spent in the theatre should have enlightened them or encour-
aged them or supported them in some aspect of the human condition’ (inter-
view in Costa 2010). Charles Spencer concluded that Ghost ‘may not be a great
musical, but it is a highly entertaining one that looks set to keep audiences
laughing, gasping and sniffling back tears for a long time to come’ (2011).
The hybrid combination of artistic innovation and commercial viability make
Warchus a musical theatre producer’s dream, whether that producer works

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 ‘Sometimes you have to make a little bit of mischief’

for a subsidized theatre or in the West End and on Broadway. Both kinds
of producers will continue taking risks on musicals, inspired by the desire to
once more achieve the winning combination a Warchus musical provides, that
‘naughty’, and entertaining, mix of musical theatre spectacle and emotion.

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Suggested citation
MacDonald, L. (2012), ‘”Sometimes you have to make a little bit of mischief”:
Matthew Warchus’ hybrid approach to musical theatre directing’, Studies
in Musical Theatre 6: 3, pp. 355–362, doi: 10.1386/smt.6.3.355_1

Contributor details
Laura MacDonald is a lecturer in American Studies at the University of
Groningen, in the Netherlands. Her articles and reviews have appeared
in Studies in Musical Theatre, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre,
New England Theatre Journal, Theatre Journal and Theatre Survey. Laura is
currently preparing a monograph investigating the persistence of the commer-
cial musical through the 1960s and 1970s. She organized Song, Stage and
Screen VII: The Musical’s Global Conquest, held in July 2012 at the University
of Groningen. Her next project explores the performance of democracy
through post-war productions of American musicals in Germany, Austria,
Japan and the Philippines. Laura tweets about her research and teaching @
lauraemacdonald.

Laura MacDonald has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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