Review: Please, sir, we want some more like New Rep's 'Oliver!'
By Iris Fanger, Daily News Correspondent
Dec 4, 2019 at 6:20 PM Dec 4, 2019 at 8:22 PM
"Oliver!" one of the best-loved British musicals of the 20th century for its memorable score, has returned to the Boston-area stage in a production that delivers a welcome holiday gift for local audiences as well as good news for the future of the New Repertory Theatre.
WATERTOWN - "Oliver!" one of the best-loved British musicals of the 20th century for its memorable score, has returned to the Boston-area stage in a production that delivers a welcome holiday gift for local audiences as well as good news for the future of the New Repertory Theatre.
Artistic Director Michael J. Bobbitt has cast the show, based on Charles Dickens' novel "Oliver Twist," to a fare-thee-well with performers blessed by strong, often operatic voices, and a troupe of gifted children guaranteed to engage the heartstrings. The young actors take on the roles of the unhappy orphans ("Food, Glorious Food") turned into budding thieves ("Consider Yourself"), with acting smarts beyond their years. Bobbitt has also choreographed the parade of dance numbers to fill the stage with movement that takes the actors from the floor to the tops of the tables and chairs, while pounding the furniture and their bodies with props and clenched fists.
The inventive scenery, designed by Luciana Stecconi, sets a distorted view of the streets of mid-19th century London within the proscenium arch of a dusty theater, echoing the twin strains of the music and lyrics by Lionel Bart with vaudeville comedy intertwined with the doleful sounds of a klezmer violin. The on-stage, eight-piece live orchestra, led by music director Sariva Goetz, sets the pace at a dead run, and is harnessed to the company's energetic performances. Both Stecconi and Goetz are faculty members at Emerson College, a reminder of the many exchanges of talent between local schools and theaters.
After the 1960 opening in London when it ran for a record 2,600 performances, "Oliver!" crossed the ocean to Broadway in 1963 and won three Tony Awards, including Best Score of a Musical, and a 1968 film version won six Oscars, including Best Picture. Bart, who also wrote the book, certainly caught the flavor of Dickens' novel, and stuffed two acts with many of Dickens' colorful characters in his attempt to follow the complicated story line as much as possible. If the second act wraps up too quickly with the happy conclusion for Oliver, along with dreadful endings for Nancy and Bill Sikes, well, there is only so much time allowed for the stage as opposed to sitting in a chair to read a novel.
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Ben Choi-Harris, Boston's most prominent child actor, centers the action as Oliver, the workhouse orphan who is buffeted by conditions beyond his control. At first. he is abused by his keepers, then sold to an undertaker and his wife, finally running away to a life of crime in London where he falls in with a group of other abandoned children. Choi-Harris has a sweetness about his stage persona, a lovely voice ("Where is Love?") and a sense of stillness as if he is watching and waiting for the better days he is sure are coming. Belmont resident Sydney Johnston, as Artful Dodger, is a saucy leader of the children in an incomparable singing and dancing performance.
More than riveting as Fagin, veteran New York actor Austin Pendleton turns the character into a teddy bear of a protector, introspective and kinder than he appears in Dickens' novel. His musings on aging at the end of the show ("Reviewing The Situation"), are spoke-sung in an introspective manner, helping to erase the stigma of anti-Semitism carried by Dickens' creation. As the good-at-heart Nancy, Daisy Layman is nothing less than sensational ("As Long As He Needs Me," arguably the most popular song from the show) in her protection of Oliver, despite her loyalty to her man, the evil Bill Sikes (Rashed Alnuami, excellent).
No need to point out the parallels to contemporary times in the plight of unprotected children abused by their elders, the dreadful outcomes of poverty, and the wide-spread, ongoing situation of homelessness. We can laugh at the antics on stage in "Oliver!" and cheer for the ingenuity of the children, but let's not forget that the passage of time has not erased these social ills.
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