The boy who asked for more
The Premiere Group’s 10th anniversary performance will be a staging of the musical Oliver!
Over the past months, since September 2005 in fact, over 100 people have been working hard in Limassol on the staging of Lionel Bart’s ever-successful version of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Over eighty children and adults will appear on stage with a full, live orchestral in the pit. It’s a big show with all the songs from the film plus a couple of others unique to the stage show.
Such an endeavour requires discipline and innovation and the workings of a double cast for the five main characters increases this workload. I am, however, assured that this production will be a worthy follower to Premiere’s earlier production of the spectacular The King and I.
The musical is under the direction of Wendy Holloway and Janet Yanni, with Musical Directors Pam DeVoss and Linda Economides and Choreographer Sharon Montague assisted by Nadine Haddad providing the schooling talent.
“It’s a cheerful, positive show with quite a lot of singing and complicated choreography,” co-director Wendy Holloway said. “It’s very visual and very enjoyable.” In addition to the 80 cast members – including 24 children – there is a huge backstage crew to handle all the props involved in the production. With 14 songs – during one of which the entire adult and some of the junior cast is on stage – it is set to bring the house down.
GK Chesterton wrote of Charles Dickens: “Relative to the other works of Dickens, Oliver Twist is not of great value, but it is of great importance. Some parts of it are so crude and of so clumsy a melodrama that one is almost tempted to say that Dickens would have been greater without it. But even if he had been greater without it he would still have been incomplete without it. With the exception of some gorgeous passages, both of humour and horror, the interest of the book lies not so much in its revelation of Dickens’ literary genius as in its revelation of those moral, personal, and political instincts which were the make-up of his character and the permanent support of that literary genius. It is by far the most depressing of all his books; it is in some ways the most irritating; yet its ugliness gives the last touch of honesty to all that spontaneous and splendid output. Without this one discordant note all his merriment might have seemed like levity.”
When Lionel Bart took on Charles Dickens, he had no plans to be reverential to the author, and on June 30, 1960 Lionel Bart’s ‘roaring’ rewrite of Dickens took 23 curtain calls at the New Theatre. It ran for 2,618 performances in London and 774 on Broadway and Lionel Bart was never to have a hit to rival Oliver! The 1968 film version, directed by Carol Reed, won several Oscars, including Best Picture. Bart had created a musical that not only captured the horrors of London’s East End but turned them around into a glorious, rollicking, fast-paced piece of theatre that, if he had been astute, would have made him one of the first theatrical millionaires. However, Bart’s next two musicals, Blitz! (1962) and Maggie May (1964), had respectable West End runs; but Twang! (1965) was a notorious flop and La Strada (1969), which opened in New York, closed after only a few performances. Bart used his personal finances to try to rescue them, selling his rights to others of his works, including Oliver!, in order to generate capital. Unsuccessful, he turned to drink, and a twenty-year period of depression ensued, from which he ultimately recovered, but he did not return to songwriting. Bart died of cancer on April 3, 1999, in London, aged 68.
Lionel Bart had, for Oliver! written timeless numbers including ‘Consider Yourself At Home’, ‘Food, Glorious Food’, ‘As Long As He Needs Me’ and ‘You’ve Got To Pick A Pocket Or Two’ and the use of children to populate the workhouse and Fagin’s lair added to its audience appeal. In his songs he displays a skill at rhyming nothing short of Gilbertian in its impudence; they are entirely unstrained, and words and music clearly belong to each other, which is one of the reasons why they are so effective in the theatre.
So it will be at the Pattichion Theatre for three nights commencing Thursday April 13, all the fervor and enthusiasm will be there with either Lawrence Coombes or Tayla Montague as Oliver, Matt Holton or Alex Norcott as The Artful Dodger; John Davis or Pete Moore as Fagin; Niki Neo or Lucy Georghiou as Nancy and Richard Didonian or Terry Judge as the evil Bill Sikes. I am sure that you will not be disappointed
Oliver! By the Premier Group
April 13 at 8pm, April 14 at 3.30 and 8pm and April 15 at 3.30 and 8pm at the Pattichion Theatre. Tickets: £10, £8 and £6. In English. Tel: 25 343331 or 25 388038, [email protected]
