Exclusive: Inside Roald Dahl's THE WITCHES with Dave Malloy and Lucy Kirkwood

In 1971, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory burst into theaters, thus marking the first major musicalization of the work of writer Roald Dahl. In the years since, audiences have been privy to many more Dahl musicals, including two stage versions of Charlie's story, Pasek & Paul’s James and the Giant Peach, and Matilda the Musical, to name just a few. However, until just recently, The Witches, one of his beloved titles, remained absent from the musical catalog. Enter composer/lyricist Dave Malloy and playwright Lucy Kirkwood. 

At first glance, the pair may seem an unlikely duo to adapt the 1983 novel. As a child, Kirkwood was a self-described “Dahl nut,” but, despite her award-winning plays, had never before written a musical. However, when the Dahl Estate gauged her interest in the material, she couldn’t turn it down. “My biggest anxiety was messing it up because it is such a beloved book both for myself and for so many other people,” the playwright recently told BroadwayWorld. 

The book centers on a young boy and his grandmother, a relationship that appealed to Kirkwood when she was growing up. “I had a very strong pair of grandmothers myself, and I think that something always spoke to me about it being a love story between a boy and his grandmother in a platonic sense. There's an older woman hero built straight into the center of it, which I always really loved.”

Malloy, on the other hand, had never read the book. “Somehow, as a kid, I missed Roald Dahl completely. I had seen Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, but I went straight from picture books to Stephen King,” the composer and lyricist shares. These days, though, he is as much of a “Dahl nut” as Kirkwood. After the invitation to join the project, he dove in headfirst. “I read it in one sitting, and I was completely blown away by it. Since then, I've literally read every single thing Dahl has ever written.” 

Together, the duo brought the tale to The National Theatre stage in 2023, with Malloy writing music and lyrics, and Kirkwood as the book writer and co-lyricist. Like many Dahl books, the story of The Witches has a not-so-subtle dark undercurrent amid its appealing whimsy. As Malloy points out, “the kid's parents die in the first two pages of the book.” Following this tragedy, the protagonist (called Luke in this version) goes through the ringer, finding himself in the care of his quirky grandmother, becoming transformed into a mouse by the terrifying Grand High Witch, and narrowly avoiding death on several occasions. The often-scary source material gave the writers permission to push the envelope and color the theatrical experience even darker than they expected for a children's show.

“I think we were very fortunate that the Dahl Estate knows that the darkness is one of the things that people love about Dahl,” notes Malloy. “If anything, they said, ‘You can dial it a little darker, a little darker.’ They were really interested in that, while, of course, still wanting to engage the children and not actually have them running from the theater in terror. It was such a fun intellectual exercise for both of us to make sure that we were serving both sides of the audience: the adults and the kids.”

Kirkwood emphasizes the importance of the preview process and how feedback, specifically from kids, allowed them the chance to see how to take it to that next level. “We spent the whole of the rehearsal period anxious that we'd made it a bit too scary and that we'd have kids getting upset. When we did our first preview, Jenny, the artistic director at the Dahl Estate, brought her 11-year-old son. We were asking him afterwards if it was too scary, and he was like, ‘No, I've seen Jurassic World. It wasn't scary at all.’ Then we suddenly went, ‘Right, we need to make it scary. We need to dial it up!’

“I think the biggest scare we got was towards the end of Act One when the Grand High Witch takes her face off,” Malloy recalls. “Our makeup department did a pretty extraordinary job with what that face looked like, and the illusion of how she transformed. That moment usually got a pretty good gasp.”

With the musical consisting of a large cast of children, the writers were also able to test the material out on a young audience in real time during rehearsals. “We had pretty immediate feedback from the kids in the room [and] by the end of the rehearsal process, the kids knew every single word of the score, even the very expositional songs that are very talky. That was really joyful to watch.”

In musicalizing the novel, the duo was also eager to capture Dahl’s voice. “When you're adapting something, I feel strongly that you have to be in love with the work and love every little nuance of the language,” Malloy explains. “Several passages of the score are word-for-word Dahl or just the smallest amount of paraphrasing to squeeze him into a lyric.” 

And even when the language wasn’t exact, Kirkwood aimed to capture Dahl’s recognizable tone: “There's a sort of mischievous, daring, but quite serious spirit in there. I think people often forget that there is the darkness, but there's also the sentimentality. And the sentimentality works because of the darkness. You believe his characters when they say, ‘I love you’ because they've also talked about the darkest corners of experience. It was always trying to keep that tar and that caramel at the same time.”

Though this is the first musical adaptation, the material has been brought to life on screen twice. First in 1990 from filmmaker Nicolas Roeg, and again 30 years later by Robert Zemeckis. In the 1990 version, the ending was radically changed from the original novel. Rather than remaining a mouse and living out the rest of his days with his grandmother, Luke returned to his original form as a boy. Dahl famously hated this decision, and Kirkwood and Malloy were keen not to replicate that choice for the musical. 

“I love everything about that film, apart from the ending. I think it was a studio decision that completely misunderstands children and thinks that children have the same kind of internal logic as adults, and that they would find that a tragedy,” explains Kirkwood. “I don't think it's a tragedy that he stays as a mouse. That boy is going to be much happier with his grandma than he might have been as a boy. There's a very different moral universe that Dahl sits in, and I think it is a mistake to try and impose a sort of conventional adult logic onto that.”

They went so far as to incorporate the ending dialogue into the final song ‘The Heart of the Mouse.’ “Luke makes the realization that ‘A mouse lives this long and a grandma lives this long, and that means we're going to die together. And that'll be great!’ I think that sentence is pretty much word-for-word. It’s a beautiful and complex sentiment. Again, Dahl doesn't dumb things down to his audience," Malloy reiterates. 

As for future productions of the musical, whether in America or elsewhere, the writers remain hopeful. “We have been doing some work on it. There are some pretty big revisions to tighten the show and make some of the dramatic arcs a bit stronger,” shares Malloy. “But I hope that if the show ever goes to America, it doesn't lose its Englishness. I think that is an essential part of the charm. One of the great joys for me, too, was collaborating with Lucy on this piece. We absolutely had to be co-lyricists because I don't speak English, I speak American.”

One such “English” element was the inclusion of Morris dancing, a traditional folk dance which Malloy and Kirkwood integrated into a key scene in the show. “Luke and Bruno have just turned into mice, and they're running through the hotel trying to get safely to their grandparents. And so, of course, they run into a room full of stomping Morris dancers,” Malloy explains. “[They are] trying not to get stomped on, which to me, as a video game kid, really reminded me of Frogger. So the music there is a hybrid of traditional Morris dancing and the theme music to Frogger, which is a deep Easter egg in the score."

In the meantime, the composer is hard at work on his next adaptation: Darren Aronofsky’s BLACK SWAN, which is coming to A.R.T. in the spring of 2026. “Next month I go into a one-month workshop for that, so I'm frantically finishing my revisions for that score,” he shares. “One of the reasons I love adaptation is that I get to play with these artists that I just love and admire. So, working on The Witches, I get to play with Roald Dahl, and, for this, I get to play with Tchaikovsky. I'm taking the score to Swan Lake and deconstructing and modernizing it to tell this horror story. Doing a psychological horror story has been very, very fun.”

As audiences await new projects from the duo, along with potential new stagings of The Witches, the cast recording for The National Theatre production is now available to stream. “It's so wonderful, especially for me, because the show happened in London. A bunch of my friends came to the opening, but my larger circle just never got to hear or see or hear the show,” says Malloy. “I think the cast did such an incredible job, and I'm just glad that that's been captured forever and that people can have it.”

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The premiere run of Roald Dahl's The Witches took place at the Olivier Theatre from November 2023 to January 2024 with a cast that included three-time Olivier-nominated Katherine Kingsley, BAFTA award-winner Daniel Rigby, Sally Ann Triplett, BERTIE Caplan, Cian Eagle-Service and more. Read reviews of the production here and check out the full recording below.

Dave Malloy Photo Credit: Marc Brenner

Lucy Kirkwood Photo Credit: Brinkhoff & Mogenburg

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