65 years of Oliver! The Musical
It’s 65 years ago this week that Oliver! opened in the West End, signalling a new spirit abroad in the British musical.
It’s 65 years ago this week that Oliver! opened in the West End, signalling a new spirit abroad in the British musical. It almost didn’t happen. Twelve managements turned down Lionel Bart’s Dickens adaptation, which distilled the original novel’s melodrama, sentiment and comedy, and added a host of memorable songs drawing on the music hall and folk traditions of both English and Jewish composers. It has become one of theatre’s enduring success stories and continues to put the om-pah-pah into London theatre. The latest revival playing at the Gielgud Theatre is co-directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne and stars Simon Lipkin as Fagin.
Bloomsbury’s British Musical Theatre since 1950 describes Oliver! as “the crowning achievement of the experiments and explorations in the creation of new types of musical theatre after the war.” Andrew Lloyd Webber has called Bart—who unusually wrote the entire shebang: book, music and lyrics—“the father of the British musical.”
Sean Kenny’s design for the 1960 production, with its moving scenery (a first for the West End), was a significant factor in the success of the show, something that designer Lez Brotherston, the long-time designer for Bourne’s dance productions, pays homage to in his set for the current revival.
The role of Fagin was, of course, originated by Ron Moody, although theatrical legend has it that the role was first offered to Sid James of the Carry On movies, who turned it down. Michael Caine is reputed to have auditioned to play Bill Sikes and was gutted when he failed to secure the role.
Simon Lipkin as Fagin in the current production of Oliver! at the Gielgud Theatre.
It made Moody a star, in the same way Fiddler on the Roof gave prominence to Zero Mostel. He returned to the role 23 years later in a revival at the Aldwych in 1984, where critics deemed him as mercurial and mischievous and as scheming and skittish as ever.
Later Fagins have sometimes struggled to surpass the Moody legend. But as Lipkin demonstrates in the current revival, it is a part that requires consummate comic timing as well as mournful melancholy. The performer has to turn on a sixpence. In Lipkin’s case, he ad-libs as well. The role has mostly gone to actors with real comic chops. Barry Humphries played the undertaker Mr. Sowerby in the premiere production and in 1967 got a stab at Fagin.
A decade later producer Cameron Mackintosh produced his first Oliver! with Roy Hudd as Fagin. But it was his 1994 revival with Jonathan Pryce as Fagin, Miles Andersen as Bill Sikes and Sally Dexter as Nancy, a production directed by Sam Mendes and which came with a £7 million advance, that attempted to inject more darkness into the musical. That production was the blueprint too for the 2009 Theatre Royal Drury Lane revival directed by rising director Rupert Goold, who declared he didn’t want it to be “a cockney knees-up.”
Goold’s Fagin was Rowan Atkinson, and Nancy was played by Jodie Prenger, who had won the role via the TV talent show, I’d Do Anything, pipping another unknown, Jessie Buckley, to the role. Buckley, of course, has gone on to star in movies and play Sally Bowles in Cabaret on stage opposite Eddie Redmayne.
Reviewing the production for the Independent, Michael Coveney was not impressed with Prenger’s performance. “She doesn’t have the depth or lung power to fill a plastic bag, let alone a West End Theatre on a nightly basis.” A long way from the current Nancy, Shanay Holmes, who plays a blinder in the role. The Financial Times observed, “Her solo As Long as He Needs Me is ripped from deep within her: far from an excuse for domestic violence, it feels like the desperate assertion of a woman trying to convince herself that things are OK.”
With the success of Oliver!—it ran for a record 2,618 performances in the West End—Bart looked set for a significant career in musical theatre. The son of an East End tailor, who could neither read nor write music and who developed his songs by singing them into a tape recorder, Bart had already found success writing pop songs, including Living Doll for Cliff Richard and the Shadows.
Current production of Oliver! at the Gielgud Theatre.
Mentored by Joan Littlewood, whose groundbreaking Theatre Workshop ran out of the Theatre Royal Stratford East, Bart wrote the music and lyrics for Frank Norman’s Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be, a story of cockney life which featured a young Barbara Windsor and premiered in 1959 before moving into the West End.
But for Bart, early success turned to disappointment. He was never to produce a musical anywhere near as successful as Oliver! and attempts to do so broke him both mentally and financially. The failure of his Robin Hood musical Twang!! (yep, it really did come with two exclamation marks) lost him a fortune, as too did a lifestyle involving copious amounts of alcohol.
Facing bankruptcy, he sold the rights to Olivier for just £300, although for the 1994 production, which took place just five years before Bart’s death from liver cancer in 1999, Macintosh gave the composer and writer a slice of the royalties.
But if Bart never fulfilled his potential, he paved the way for a new generation of British musical theatre writers, composers, and lyricists who took the Americans on at their own game and dismantled the Broadway dominance of the musical. And in Oliver!, his legacy endures and is likely to do so because it’s one of British theatre’s most beloved musicals and audiences are always asking for more.
Cover photo from Oliver!, playing at the Gielgud Theatre. Book your tickets now on our website or app.
