Less, please, of this overblown Oliver! PATRICK MARMION reviews Oliver! at London's Gielgud Theatre
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Verdict: Loud and overstated. Rating:. Reality doesn’t really belong in Lionel Bart’s joyous musical staging of Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Far from being a work of social realism, his show is a glorious escape from the grim reality of the Victorian orphanages and criminal underworld where it’s set.
Thanks to a famously unbeatable roster of music hall tunes — from Food Glorious Food to Consider Yourself — it’s a big, beaming, toe-tapping lark. That’s why I find it odd that Cameron Mackintosh’s much-feted revival (first seen in Chichester last year), directed by the choreographer Matthew Bourne, seems anxious to remind us that life below the poverty line in 19th-century London was no joke.
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The domestic violence of the villain Bill Sikes is brutally emphasised, and a slogan overhead at Oliver’s orphanage sarcastically proclaims ‘God Is Love’. But that’s not to say there’s no fun. Unsurprisingly, Bourne’s choreography runs like a Rolls-Royce. Oom-Pah-Pah after the interval is one of the most exuberant welcome-back songs ever written.
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Cast of Oliver! at The Gielgud Theatre in London on January 14. Cast members bow at the curtain call during the press night performance of "Oliver!" at The Gielgud Theatre on January 14. And the show is, for a lot of the time, a proper Cockney knees-up, with the barrel well and truly rolled out in tunes like You’ve Got To Pick A Pocket Or Two and Be Back Soon.
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