Willy Wonka Chicago Shakespeare Theater
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Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is Dahl’s masterpiece in this regard, a kind of festival of prepubescent pain. The source of multiple movie and stage adaptations—including Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley’s bland musical, Willy Wonka, now at Chicago Shakespeare Theater—it starts with the Dickensian sufferings of poor little Charlie Bucket, who lives in a shack with mom and dad and two pairs of bedridden grandparents—both in fact ridden to the same bed. Dad’s job screwing caps onto toothpaste tubes is enough to sustain the family for a while, but when he loses it the cabbage soup gets thinner and so do the Buckets. Dahl doesn’t soften the situation. “Slowly but surely, everybody in the house began to starve,” he writes. And Charlie? “And now, very calmly, with that curious wisdom that seems to come so often to small children in times of hardship, he began to make little changes here and there in some of the things that he did, so as to save his strength,” Dahl continues, in a passage worthy of a concentration camp narrative. “Everything he did now, he did slowly and carefully, to prevent exhaustion.”
At which point the story turns into a bizarre variation on a medieval morality play. Where Charlie goes around expressing an Oliver Twist-ish nobility, the four other winners embody what Dahl saw, 44 years ago, as modern childhood’s deadly sins. The fat German kid, Augustus Gloop, is obviously gluttony. Spoiled Veruca Salt is greed. Mike Teavee, the TV addict, could be sloth. And Violet Beauregarde—well, I guess she’s just a brat who won’t stop chewing gum. The factory tour becomes Dahl’s way of damning these pint-sized miscreants and their enabling parents to neatly allegorical—if often sloppily scatological—forms of hell.
The result of all this sugarcoating, oddly enough, is a very saccharin piece of work. Joe Leonardo’s hour-long staging attempts to combat this effect: Charlie’s grandparents, the Oompa-Loompas, and a few others are portrayed by Meredith Miller’s clever, vivid puppets, and some performances are allowed to edge toward the subversive—most notably George Andrew Wolff’s as a fey, hilarious Augustus Gloop.
