Review: "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" Delivers Vivid Invention

Broadway + NYC

Broadway

Off-Broadway

Off-Off Broadway

Cabaret

Dance

Opera

Classical Music

Eastern

Central

Western

West End

WEST END

UK Regional

International

Canada

Australia / New Zealand

Europe

Asia

Latin America

Africa / Middle East

Entertainment

TV/Movies

Music

The gates to the chocolate factory are open at the Sands Theatre through June 14.

POPULAR

Get all the top news & discounts for Singapore & beyond.

Singapore — The 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory created a vivid, ridiculous world of invention. The 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory visually showed us what this could be and stretched the bounds of oddity. The musical Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that has just landed at the Sands Theatre leans into this spirit. It keeps the heart of the material and commits even further into the absurdity. It guarantees a night at the theatre that will leave you going “what…was…that." A night you won’t soon forget.

Get all the top news & discounts for Singapore & beyond.

The stage musical Charlie and the Chocolate Factory first opened in the West End in 2013. It was based on the Roald Dahl novel, with a new score by Tony Award® winners Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman , and the book by David Greig . It then opened on Broadway in 2017 with many changes made, including changing the score to add some of the iconic songs from the 1971 film.

The musical that lands in Singapore is presented in special arrangement with Music Theatre International (MTI) and Broadway Asia Company . It features original direction by four-time Tony Award® winning director Jack O’Brien, and original choreography by Joshua Bergasse , the global tour features Direction by Matt Lenz , Choreography by Alison Solomon and Musical Supervision by Nate Patten and Greg Jarrett as well as an award-winning Broadway creative, design, and production team. Mark Thompson , set and costume design; Christine Peters , tour scenic design; Jeff Sugg , projections design; Rory Beaton , lighting design; Mike Thacker for Orbital Sound , sound design; Basil Twist , puppet design; and Tim Clothier, illusions. Orchestrations by Doug Besterman , and Musical Arrangements by Marc Shaiman . Casting is by Paul Hardt Casting . Joseph Longthorne serves as General Manager and Tayn Yeo as Associate Manager for Broadway Asia International.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory argues that imagination and the bizarre are two sides of the same coin, and unabashedly celebrates them. At the heart of this musical is Charlie Bucket (Oliver Wong). Charlie seems to have seeds of endless imagination. Wong portrayed a perfectly bright-eyed and curious Charlie, an innocent dreamer with an unwavering desire for inventing chocolates. Wong has a natural grasp on musicality that particularly shone through in his fun, skilled, enthusiastic maneuvering of quick songs like “Willy Wonka! Willy Wonka!” He absolutely holds his own in this wonderful company, and is the beating heart of the show. Charlie is a bit of an oddball as he spends all his time daydreaming and penning down new ideas, which elicits some frustration from his mother, Mrs. Bucket (Jill-Christine Wiley). Mrs. Bucket is tasked with reminding us of the Bucket family’s stiff economic constraints. She grounds us in the dire reality of the world. She pushes Charlie to do the practical things necessary to keep their family afloat, which unfortunately does not involve eating or making chocolates. While Charlie possesses an unquenchable inventive spirit, his family faces dire economic hardship. This means Charlie’s ideas could only remain in his water-damaged notebook. His love for chocolate could only materialise once a year in the form of one singular birthday chocolate bar. The sweet Charlie’s love for invention balanced with a love for his family cannot help but make our cynical hearts hope again. We root for him to get a Golden Ticket. We root for his dreams to come true.

Just like us, The Bucket family endlessly roots for Charlie’s supposedly unreachable dreams. Grandpa Joe ( Steve McCoy ) is a dreamer with endless (possibly real, possibly fake) stories to tell. “I’ve Got a Golden Ticket” / “Grandpa Joe” is one of the sweetest moments in this show. Grandpa Joe is so committed to joining Charlie to achieve his dreams that he willfully regains the ability to walk. While Grandpa Joe has bad knees, McCoy certainly does not, as he excels in original choreography by Joshua Bergasse and Alison Solomon that swing between Grandpa Joe struggling to put himself back on his feet and him cheerfully dancing with Charlie and Mrs. Bucket. Beyond Grandpa Joe, the show peels behind Mrs. Bucket’s practicality and shows us her affection for the dreamers in her family in the sentimental song “If Your Father Were Here.” Wiley sings with a sweet, balanced mix that soars with both grief and love. These very real, relatable human emotions tug at the audience and is a soaring moment of honesty amidst a hilarious kooky funfest.

The world outside the Bucket house is filled with beautifully peculiar characters. Leading the charge in the march of celebrated oddity is Willy Wonka ( Daniel Plimpton ). This Willy Wonka is one complex package. He is a people-hating oddball who likes to drop silly one-liners, a bit of a magician, and a negligent CEO. Coupled with Plimpton’s energetic and frantic physicality, this Willy Wonka has the quality of someone who never quite outgrew being a boy. He is a dreamer who runs on an endless engine tank of imagination, except now he’s got the funds to actualise his ideas. This boyish take on Wonka balances his seemingly contradicting personality traits with ease. He isn’t the type to care about other humans, or to panic about his factory’s compliance with safety standards. This man singularly cares about transforming each of his ideas into a factory full of impossible delicacies. His example shows us (and Charlie) that childlike imagination can indeed be rewarded, and those weird, out-of-reach dreams can materialise into an edible land of chocolate.

In a world of eccentric characters, we would be amiss to forget the Oompa Loompas. They are brought to life with puppet design by Basil Twist and a hardworking ensemble. In this musical, they function as a Grim Reaper put in a jester costume in a tiny, fun package. For fans of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , seeing how the show has brought these creatures to life will be well worth the trip.

The rest of the wonderfully odd characters that colour this world are the Golden Ticket winners. They each have very unique characteristics and backgrounds. Augustus Gloop ( Sam Nackman ) is a fat Bavarian child which apparently gives him uncontrollable hunger. This unfortunately awful and lazy writing is a remnant of Dahl’s novel. Mrs. Gloop ( Jorie Janeway ) laments about her family in a song that is essentially a Bavarian spin on Meg Brockie from Brigadoon. The Gloops are written as extremely one-dimensional characters, with only one trait that their entire plot revolves around: Augustus being fat. Despite the lack of meat in this material, Nackman and Janeway milked every second of physical comedy they could in these admittedly flat roles. Veruca Salt ( Allison Gann ) is a whiny, spoiled brat in a pink tutu who has her father, a permissive Mr. Salt ( Brandon Grimes ), strangled in her mink. Gann makes a true nightmare-child out of Veruca with the most growly, nasally screams you could not ignore. In the competition of “spoiled rich kids with talent,” Violet Beauregarde (Giselle Amarisa Watts) enters the ring with vocals to boot. The “Queen of Pop” has a strong affinity for gum, while sounding like the missing child of Destiny’s Child. Her father, Mr. Beauregarde ( Darren Lorenzo ), is desperately trying to push her into stardom and acts like her PR manager. Mike Teevee ( DJ Plunkett ) is a child whose whole soul is tethered to his electronics, and has a 1950s suburban housewife for a mom, Mrs. TeeVee ( Kelly Brandeburg ), who looks like she just popped out of The Donna Reed Show. These vastly contrasting personalities are interestingly differentiated in the music that serves you high-belting pop, punk rock, and Bavarian folk.

The show continues to go all-in on the wonderfully weird. As we move further into the show, the crazier plot points in the musical are complemented by equally crazy choreography and direction. The Act 2 squirrel ballet in “Veruca’s Nutcracker: Sweet”, likely a nod to The Mouse King in The Nutcracker, is the star of nightmares. This number will make you wonder if you accidentally took a dose of heavy-duty cough syrup at intermission. It is hilarious, leaves your mouth agape, and ends with you hearing audience members around you whispering “what just happened?”

Unfortunately, some aspects of this show fail to live up to its inventive spirit. The projections are a bombardment of lights, and does a decent job in the earlier fast-paced numbers. It utilises the side walls of the Sands Theatre more consistently than any production of late, attempting to create a far-reaching immersive experience. However, the projections were so heavily relied on instead of practical sets. While screens and projections have quickly become a norm for tours, for a musical that celebrates imagination and invention, this choice felt purely uninspired. Arguably, the most egregious moment was during “Pure Imagination”. This iconic location is meant to boast machinery that should be too far-fetched to exist, yet somehow materialise in front of you as functional, edible dreams. This production takes your dreams and serves you screens. We simply get another hefty load of saturated colour filling our sight. Instead of tasting like ingenuity, they simply taste artificial. The spirit of invention perhaps washed away in the strength of the digital chocolate waterfall. Nevertheless, the beautiful score and Plimpton’s vocals make the experience of hearing “Pure Imagination” live still feel like a delectable melt-in-your-mouth chocolate.

The book attempts to reinvent and modernise the story, yet fail to reinvent the most critical aspects that date the material. It makes references to modern technology and social media, particularly when it comes to Violet and Mike. These did not feel particularly necessary, as they were mostly one-liner jokes, but they landed fine. In response to criticism of the films’ lack of racial diversity, the musical also manages to retool Violet’s character pretty successfully, and we finally get some long overdue diversity. However, the musical is unable to reinvent some of the most egregious remnants of the novel. As mentioned earlier, Augustus Goop’s only character trait is being fat, a “great big greedy nincompoop,” and this is played for laughs constantly, and his character flaw is an unbridled, uncontrollable hunger. These are antiquated ideas stemming from anti-fat bias. It is truly sad that this show forces plus-size actors to take on roles that uphold such wrong and harmful ideas about plus-size people. Furthermore, the Oompa Loompas entire origin story is told through “When Willy Met Oompa”, which could frankly also be called the ballad of the “white saviour,” as he justifies enslaving a whole race of people who are somehow grateful for him doing so. Both these parts of the story trace back to Roald Dahl ’s novel itself, and have been heavily criticised over the years. It truly makes one wonder why these weren’t the parts worth revising, or if they were simply too deeply ingrained in the bones of the material that we cannot revise them. Nevertheless, if you want to watch this production, I encourage having responsible conversations with your party about these concepts to ensure that impressionable audience members do not walk away internalising harmful, untrue ideas.

Ultimately, this show is a great celebration of committing to the bit, and relishing in the weirdest, fun

_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/singapore/article/REVIEW-Odd-is-a-Gift-from-God-in-CHARLIE-AND-THE-CHOCOLATE-FACTORY-20260525)._