“Oliver!”, Chichester Festival Theatre
Mark Shenton in West Sussex
25 July 2024
Producer Cameron Mackintosh has his own name alone above the title of Les Miserables, setting his contribution as producer above those of the authors and creative team; the advertising for the show proudly proclaims it to be the world’s favourite musical. It is now approaching its fortieth anniversary since its original London opening and has run there ever since, bar the Covid interruption, including at one point in three separate and simultaneous iterations.
The ensemble.
Photo credit: Johan Persson.
The 1960 musical Oliver! is unquestionably Britain’s favourite home-grown musical, featuring book, music and lyrics by Lionel Bart and freely adapted from Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist. But Bart now newly shares an author’s credit with Mackintosh too, who claims responsibility for revising it as well as now reviving it at Chichester Festival Theatre in a brand-new co-production that has already announced its transfer to the Gielgud Theatre in December.
For now, it appropriately sits in the summer programme as part of new artistic director Justin Audibert’s debut season that is dominated by adaptations of novels by Philippa Gregory (The Other Boleyn Girl), Jamila Gavin (Coram Boy) and John le Carré (The Spy Who Came In From The Cold) as well as new stage adaptations of plays by Strindberg (The Promise, adapted from Miss Julie) and John Willard (The Cat and the Canary).
Though there’s a jaunty music hall vibe to Bart’s re-imagining of Dickens, this new version of Oliver! introduces some darker colours to up the dramatic stakes, as well as at times reminding you that the creators of the musical version of Les Miserables were partly inspired by Oliver!
There is a similar portrait of the inequalities prevailing in Victorian England, just like those in Victor Hugo’s France; a villainous perpetrator wrestling with the show’s chief protagonist (like that between Javert and Valjean) in the plot’s most dramatic confrontation between Bill Sikes and the young title character orphan boy found in a workhouse and conscripted first to work in a funeral parlour and then with a gang of criminal youths controlled by an apparently kindly but actually dangerous operator called Fagin.
At the peak of the show’s action, there is even a chase across a series of bridges that ends in a death, just as Javert meets his end in Les Mis; this is intricately staged on the walkways and different levels of Lez Brotherston’s impressively epic set, atmospherically lit by Paule Constable and Ben Jacobs that is full of smouldering haze.
Director/designer Matthew Bourne (who also choreographed Macintosh’s earlier 1994 and 2009 revivals at the London Palladium and Theatre Royal, Drury Lane), now working with co-director Jean-Pierre van der Spuy and two associate choreographers (Etta Murfitt and Sam Archer), supplies the necessary grit and spectacle, particularly in the big crowd scenes and ensemble dance numbers like “Who Will Buy?”
As the forever memorable songs follow hard upon each other, from “Food, Glorious Food” and “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two” to “I’d Do Anything”, each featuring Oliver and his colleagues in the workhouse and Fagin’s den, the audience floats on a collective wave of nostalgia and euphoria: this is a score most of us have grown up on. (It is splendidly played by an orchestra led by musical supervisor and conductor Graham Hurman).
The ensemble.
Photo credit: Johan Persson.
Oliver (played on press night by Cian Eagle-Service with a soaring choir boy soprano’s unwavering clarity of tone) plus seven cohorts brings an irrepressible and infectious enthusiasm to the stage to keep it bright and light, even when darker hues threaten clouds and slow down the pace at times. Billy Jenkins, who is just 17 but does all performances as the Artful Dodger, is a mischievous delight of confidence and brio.
That balance between light and shade is expertly caught by Simon Lipkin’s commanding Fagin, who is frequently mischievously funny but also sinister; it’s a high-risk performance that also properly owns the character’s religious heritage, without descending into anti-Semitic tropes that a non-Jewish actor might be accused of. He does a stunning job with his act two showstopper “Reviewing the Situation”.
Dramatic honours are shared with Shanay Holmes’s Nancy and Aaron Sidwell as her abusive boyfriend Bill Sikes. This relationship, which to modern eyes is deeply problematic, is articulated with integrity here, even if Holmes’s gorgeously and robustly sung “As Long as He Needs Me” is a cry of both defiance and a sad co-dependence.
This is a beautiful production of a much loved musical, bursting with warmth and just the right darkness and shade.
