AS LONG AS WE NEED IT…
To do a timeworn musical, entangled in all- too -familiar earworms, you can either sharpen, challenge and update it or lovingly polish the old machine. If you sharpen and strip it you risk a certain dismay in the faithful ( as in the Fish and Fein noirish Oklahoma) but it might be a revelation. Harder, in a way, to polish it with such loving respect that a half-forgotten gleam suddenly makes all its world new. This takes the second route, and Oliver 2004 comes up shiny fresh.
To achieve top polish of this Lionel Bart perennial, you gotta pick a genius artist or two: this Chichester has done, with Cameron Mackintosh’s loving re-production . Matthew Bourne directs and, importantly, choreographs, giving the ragamuffin boys and surging London crowds just the right level of joyful looseness, kicking and swirling and crowding and revolving. Graham Hurman’s musical supervision faultlessly finds its way between music-hall Oom-pah-pah and the ethereal beauty of the dawn street cries in Who Will Buy? Oliver – Cian Eagle-Service on press night – is confidently, heartbreakingly touching. And it all takes place within Lez Brotherston’s astonishing , vigorous, atmospheric and intricately detailed old-London set which turns and grows, brilliantly exciting from any of the three sides of the auditorium: here’s : Sikes lurking on metal stairs, Oliver singing his aubade on a balcony, Fagin’s den shrouded in stolen silk handkerchiefs, crowds whirling beneath.
Fagin, though! Simon Lipkin is a revelation, free of both caricature and the merry familiar tributes to Ron Moody: he’s as vigorous and teasing as a standup, giving the rogue an air constantly conflicted, tremblingly scared of Sikes, waving away the klezmer violin moments, human and redeemable: his final appearance, arm in arm fatherly with the Artful Dodger, is unexpectedly moving. Aaron Sidwell’s Bill Sikes was unexpected too: his assured menace explodes into sudden violence, but more unsettling still is a curious edge of nasal camp in his voice. Shanay Holmes’ Nancy is tarty and larky, decent and deluded: when she wanders round the stage singing ” As long as he needs me” she seems to be searching , without much hope, for someone to agree with her fatal loyalty.
Full confession: after 64 years of star-studded productions and school galas, and the movie, and endless muzakized tunes, I was tired of Oliver. Barely wanted to go. Before last night, the last pleasure I got of its existence was Alan Bennett’s wonderfully catty remark about trying to cast The History Boys, ans suffering theough auditions of prematurely aged child actors – “The boys who’d been in Oliver: Lionel Bart cut a swathe theough the youthof England like the Somme”. None of that here; even Bennett might smile at the natural, ebullient, Bourne ensemble. Bravo. You got me back.
cft.org.uk to 7 Sept
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