When the curtains open on the Benson stage this weekend, the Homecoming musical will bring to life the story of Matilda, a precocious child who uses her special powers to survive in a world of awful adults. If the basic premise sounds familiar, it may be because it\u2019s a staple of children\u2019s literature. Good-hearted kids are the heroes, and mean, nasty grown-ups get their comeuppance.
\nWhile some writers exploit this theme to pander to their young readers, not all of them do. In fact, Matilda herself springs from the pen of the most unsentimental and delightfully macabre of children\u2019s authors, a man who showed that people of all ages can be either decent or rotten. A man who talked up to kids and who was one of the architects of my childhood.
\nThe Welsh-born Roald Dahl was an ace fighter pilot during World War II and later one of the most successful authors of all time. A boyhood incident in a candy store \u2014 where he was caned by a tyrannical schoolmaster for putting a dead mouse in a jar of gobstoppers \u2014 was, to say the least, a formative experience.
\nI was a senior in high school when Roald Dahl died in 1990, and a long time had passed since I had picked up one of his books. But his eccentric novels were a critical part of my education, giving me an early appreciation for quirky British humor. I read them over and over \u2014 dreaming of tunneling underground with the foxes, sailing the ocean in a giant peach, and soaring into outer space in the great glass elevator.
\nAfter all, Mr. Dahl is the writer who gave us the unhinged candy-maker Willy Wonka and his rhyming Oompa-Loompas. Yes, the story centers on the good-natured Charlie Bucket. But when it comes to showing how gleefully awful children can be, few can match Roald Dahl.
\nAugustus Gloop \u2014 the glutton named for a Roman emperor. Violet Beauregarde \u2014 the insufferable gum addict. Veruca Salt \u2014 the kind of spoiled brat who could easily be rubbed into a wound. Mike Teevee \u2014 the embodiment of what has been wrong with every media-soaked 8-year-old from 1948 to the present. And get this \u2014 Wonka lures them all into his chocolate factory to be tortured in bizarre, sugar-coated ways.
\nMillions of adults are still trying to explain to their therapists why they loved all this so much as kids.
\nBut even when he relied on more traditional archetypes of the pure child mistreated by horrid relatives, Dahl never played by the rules. Hence the story of \u201cJames and the Giant Peach,\u201d where sweet little James is the victim of two terrible aunts \u2014 wickedly named Spiker and Sponge \u2014 who refuse to let him have any fun. He makes up for lost time, though, when he hitches a ride on a strangely mobile giant peach, along with a caterpillar, a ladybug, a spider and more.
\nDahl had fun with talking animals, never more so than in \u201cThe Fantastic Mr. Fox,\u201d a book I remember listening to my teacher read aloud. All Mr. Fox wants to do is to grab a bite of food, but he soon runs afoul of three cantankerous farmers: Boggis, Bunce and Bean. Vowing to kill the thief but too lazy to give chase, these dolts set up camp at his foxhole with rifles aimed at the opening.
\nSo, our hero simply devises an elaborate network of underground tunnels leading straight into the chicken coops of messieurs Bean, Bunce and Boggis \u2014 robbing them blind while they sit, year-round, waiting by the foxhole.
\nAs a child I sympathized with the clever underdog outwitting the grownups. Now, sadly, the tables have turned, and moles have created the same tunnel system under my house. If I did not have a full-time job, I would be sitting beside the molehill day and night with a rifle. That is, if I had a rifle.
\nOnly recently have I discovered \u201cThe BFG,\u201d written by Dahl in 1982. I don\u2019t know how I missed it at age 10, except to say that in those days I was deep into a Star Wars mania that blocked out everything else. But I watched the 2016 film for the first time just a few weeks ago and was enchanted by the tale of a Big Friendly Giant, who rescues a girl from being eaten by his not-so-friendly giant neighbors.
\nWhile good always triumphs at the end of his books, I loved that the Welsh author\u2019s crazy landscape was populated with oddballs of every age, and with wonderful words like \u201cscrumdiddlyumptious,\u201d \u201csnozzcumbers\u201d and \u201cVermicious Knids.\u201d So, as you cheer on little Matilda in her battles with the wicked Miss Trunchbull, be sure to give a wink to that line in the program that says, \u201cBased on the novel by Roald Dahl.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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