Matilda's Tim Minchin to Write New Musical

Tim Minchin is riding high in London’s West End after turning Roald Dahl’s Matilda into a critically acclaimed and commercially successful musical which is heading for Broadway next year
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But the talented British-born, Australian-raised writer has told The Standard that he going to write an original play against the advice of theatre impresarios Lord Lloyd-Webber, Sir Cameron Mackintosh and Stephen Sondheim.

They all urged him to choose a classic story for a new show, but Minchin says he is "Desperate to do the opposite. I want to go back into my studio and get on my piano, and just see what I feel like writing. My suspicion is I will feel like writing a musical I've been thinking about since I was 18. It's an original story, which is apparently what musicals can't be. Andrew Lloyd Webber, Stephen Sondheim and Cameron Mackintosh have all told me to my face I should concentrate on classic stories, and that makes me want to ignore them. Matilda's running and I've got my career in comedy, so I can handle a failure. It's a love story, quite dark: the lovers don't meet until quite late in the piece. It's about fate and destiny, quite a Greek-style drama with meddling, incompetent gods.”

Good luck to him I say as Matilda is one of the best thing's I've seen in the West End for a long while.