Jesse Green for Vulture spends a good chunk of time shifting the blame from the creators...
"On the page, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory immediately reveals itself as a bad candidate for stage musicalization, despite a number of so-called songs (actually weird doggerel) already in the text. For one thing, the story is so heavily patterned it quickly grows both predictable and laborious: One at a time, five children find the golden tickets that Wonka has hidden in his chocolate bars; when they come to the factory to claim the grand prize, they are eliminated in aptly awful ways until only our hero, Charlie Bucket, remains. (We know he is our hero because he is neither fat nor rich nor gross nor acquisitive.) To the extent Dahl invests much writerly energy in anything, it’s not in evocative dialogue or depth of character but in the imaginative products and bizarre processes of the factory: [...] As such, it’s both a weird read and a disturbing one
The two movie adaptations got around these problems by substantially altering the story (in different ways) and playing up the fantasy and special effects. For the stage musical those solutions were themselves problems. With fans invested in the different versions of the tale, the authors, perhaps at the behest of the rights-holders, seem to have felt obligated to include elements of all three, leading to a confusion of characterization and tone that Grieg could not resolve.
And when the theater is in competition with film over special effects, theater will lose. Understanding this, and apparently in response to the London production’s elaborateness, O’Brien rebuilt the New York version as a simpler affair, hoping the audience would use its imagination to fill in the blanks; the result is an unusually dull set design by Mark Thompson and effects that would hardly have seemed special twenty years ago.
The last paragraph is the only one that really focuses on this show.
