Tim Minchin's Matilda is the musical of the moment

WEST END critics are raving about the Royal Shakespeare Company's musical adaptation of Roald Dahl's classic children's story Matilda. With lyrics and a musical score by Australian comedian Tim Minchin, the RSC production has already snapped up the Best Music laurel at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards along with a bagful of glowing reviews.

Matilda is a gem, says Henry Hitchings in the Evening Standard. After a successful run in Stratford on Avon, it bursts onto the London stage, "every bit as enchanting".

The adaptation of the cherished story of a girl confronting bullies at home and at school "is a winter warmer but with a nice side-order of surrealism", adds Hitchings. It oozes humour "without veering towards smugness".

Tim Walker in The Daily Telegraph writes: "While it lacks a big, hummable number, it is presented with such exuberance and flair that no adult – or child – in the first night audience seemed able to resist it."

Walker says it is now difficult to argue that the RSC have no business making musicals when they're clearly very good at it. With Dennis Kelly's script, Minchin's composition and the great Matthew Warchus directing, Matilda "seems assured of a long-term home at the Cambridge Theatre".

Kelly, has, if anything, heightened Dahl's awareness of both the mean-spirited and the miraculous, says Michael Billington in The Guardian. Minchin's ebullient music and lyrics add to the gaiety of the show while Warchus's direction also "keeps the stage a riot of kaleidoscopic activity".

It's hard to imagine a production capturing the spirit of Roald Dahl's literary world more perfectly than this one, says Imogen Carter in The Observer. "You'd be a nitwit to miss this hit show." ·