Theater Talkback: In the Minority

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Oona Laurence on Broadway in “Matilda the Musical.”

I’ll admit, I don’t have it as bad as poor little Matilda. For her assorted deviances from the norm, she is called stupid at home and routinely humiliated at school. I, on the other hand, am merely made to feel uncomfortable, alienated, and perhaps a shade indignant on account of my most recent heresy: I didn’t much like “Matilda the Musical.”

Yes, I’m talking about the same new Broadway show that critics, including Ben Brantley of the TImes, have welcomed as a revolutionary miracle, the best musical of this or of many recent seasons, and so on, and which audiences seem to be embracing just as enthusiastically. I came, I saw, and though “Matilda” eventually conquered me, kinda sorta, in its last third, I spent an inordinate amount of the show just not feeling it. The lavish storybook design and fluid direction, the lively if over-insistent music, the brightly drawn performances â€" none of these were working on me, not until deep into the second act, when the story takes an unabashedly Gothic turn and the show’s cartoon villain, Miss Trunchbull, takes center stage, in Bertie Carvel’s definitive, mesmerizingly odd performance.

Still, mine was a conditional surrender at best. Certain flaws still nagged: “Matilda” has the sneer of satire, but what world is it satirizing, exactly, with its grossly caricatured adults and plaster-saint children? It’s a fairy tale of sorts, sure, but would it be too much to ask that anyone onstage behave like a recognizable human being? (Come to think of it, my second-act capitulation also had a lot to do with the lovely, uplifting song “When I Grow Up,” in which the show’s amped-up little over-performers take a breath to behave like actual kids.)

It is one of the mixed blessings of theater-going that an experience as conflicted as this-the kind of odd-man-out feeling that can force us to reconsider our own tastes and biases â€" is likely to haunt us as much or more than a blissfully untroubled evening of theatrical pleasure. For if there are stages of grief, there are just as surely stages of not-liking-a-show-as-much-as-everyone-else. Do the Germans have a word for this?

In my case, when a show feels to me like it’s falling short of its hype or its intentions, I first start to look harder and harder at it â€" maybe too hard. The next stage, it’s only fair to admit, can be a sort of immature contrarian glee, the feeling that you alone are seeing the emperor’s nakedness, and what are all those other fools thinking? Then comes reckoning, when you find yourself articulating your objections to your theater-going companion and peers, or, if you’re so inclined, on a blog or via social media.

This leads inexorably into the next stage, which I find the hardest: reconsideration. I try not to look too closely at reviews before I see a show, and when I go back and read them after the fact, I find myself alternately reassured and challenged, even at times persuaded to see a show differently in retrospect. But when my feelings are as divergent from the reviews as they were about “Matilda,” browsing through the raves can feel like an out-of-body experience, a near-Orwellian process in which my own memories are being subtly changed or replaced, my misgivings unseated by effusions. With every point I concede â€" yes, that song was charming, now that I think of it â€" I feel more and more unmoored from myself, and from the experience I could swear I had in that theater that night. Can that be taken away from me? Even if I might wish it so, I would hope not.

Sometimes I emerge from such second-guessing in full hairshirt mode â€" the fault is mine, not the show’s â€" and at other times I maintain a stubbornly defiant front worthy of steely Matilda herself. Either way, processing such profound disagreement is valuable, if only because it offers a visceral experience of a banal truth: that all art is radically subjective, and the rest is interpretation.

How about you? When did you feel like the vocal minority, alienated from the cheering section for a popular show? And how did you handle it?