I’ve no idea who played the title character in this production of Oliver! – I’m not on the press list for Chichester Festival Theatre (partly because we did ask them once and they said no, and partly because I don’t want to feel obligated to go to everything they do there). But it’s remarkable that there wasn’t a cast board (or there was, it wasn’t anywhere prominent) to say which children were on, and while safeguarding must be paramount, it is the sort of detail that would be supplied to reviewers on press night. So I don’t know who played any of ‘Fagin’s Gang’ – namely Snatch, Filch, Spiv, Kenpop, Sid, George and Swindler. It’s one of three people listed in the show’s programme (there are some girls in Fagin’s Gang, rightly or wrongly), and as with the best of musical productions, some people in the Saturday matinee audience I attended found it extraordinary that the whole thing was going to be staged all over again a couple of hours later for another sold out crowd in the evening.
My exit poll (totally unscientific in every way, of course) revealed there was an appetite for CFT to do more musicals – most of their programme diet consists of plays, or as one lady insisted on calling them, “weird stuff”. There was a lot of praise for Simon Lipkin’s Fagin and for Shanay Holmes’ Nancy – respectively, their performances in ‘Reviewing the Situation’ and ‘As Long As He Needs Me’ brought the house down. The programme refers to ‘revisions and new material by Cameron Mackintosh’. I don’t know what they are, but he’s retained Bill Sikes’ (Aaron Sidwell) misogyny of Nancy and mistreatment of – well, just about everybody, and the essence of this well-known story set in Victorian London is very much retained.
When a new Prime Minister is dubbed ‘Sir Kid Starver’ within weeks of taking office, one wonders how much has really changed in terms of the plight of the poorest children in society – we may have moved away from orphanages to ‘children in care’, largely through fostering, but there are some children out there who are dreaming of ‘Food, Glorious Food’ as the workhouse children were in this musical. Sidwell’s Sikes, who speaks and sings in a higher register than Billy Jenkins’ Artful Dodger, seems to be deliberately portrayed as rather infantile, while Lipkin’s Fagin is more of a big kid, as it were.
By the time it comes to London it will effectively be a festive show – Sikes was booed by the woman next to me at curtain call, and she wasn’t the only one to boo. Perhaps there might be some Oliver! themed merchandise in the theatre foyer by then too. It’s a solid, dependable and reliable revival, without any radical reinterpretations. Full of charm, heart and humour, it’s just the tonic for strained and difficult times.
Until 7 September 2024, then transfers to London’s Gielgud Theatre (performances from 14 December 2024). Photo credit: Johan Persson.
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