The Stage

Oliver!

Published Wednesday 8 February 2012 at 10:34 by Mark Shenton

February 7 marked the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens so it’s highly appropriate to celebrate the occasion by re-visiting the musical based on one of his most famous works that has become a classic in its own right. Lionel Bart’s Oliver!, now amazingly itself over half a century old, is to the West End musical what Guys and Dolls is to Broadway, at once ageless, timeless and matchless.

And producer Cameron Mackintosh, for whom the show has always played a special role as he was an acting stage manager in an early tour of the show, pays it a special warm new compliment by reinvigorating it anew for an extensive UK tour. Elements of Laurence Connor’s new production are heavily indebted to Mackintosh’s spectacular London Palladium and Drury Lane stagings, originally staged by Sam Mendes then recreated by Rupert Goold, with Matthew Bourne’s punchy, playful choreography intact and parts of original designer Anthony Ward’s scenic vistas, like the reveal of St Paul’s Cathedral and the Bloomsbury crescent where Mr Brownlow lives, also on display again.

But there are also some new, darker textures brought out by the more intimate, domesticated scale of the staging, so that the jaunty, music hall influenced songs, like Consider Yourself, I’d Do Anything and of course Oom-pah-pah, don’t entirely drown Dickens’s more serious intentions. Some of that grit is provided by the powerful, passionate delivery of rising star Samantha Barks as Nancy. Her brassy, ferocious rendition of As Long as He Needs Me is inevitably the show’s dramatic high point.

By contrast, Neil Morrissey is more ham than kosher as a bedraggled Fagin, and full of awkward bits of interpolated business and words. There are some more revealing textures brought out elsewhere in a cast that don’t rely quite so much on broad gestures.