Over the last three Christmas periods, Daniel Evans – AD at Sheffield Theatres – has delivered sumptuous, world-class revivals of Me & My Girl, Company and My Fair Lady; this year he turns his attention to Lionel Bart’s Oliver! staging a glorious and epic production complete with an 82-strong ensemble.
The iconic status of a musical like Oliver! makes it difficult to inject the material with a sense of freshness while retaining the crowd-pleasing elements that’s made it such a firm favourite to begin with. It’s a balancing act, but it’s one which Evans pulls off, in a production which merges darker Dickensian elements with an overall atmosphere of ebullience and joy.
Of course, underneath all the singing and dancing, Oliver! is at heart a fairly grim tale of abused children, battered prostitutes and street psychopaths. Evans doesn’t shy away from exploring these elements, nor does he have any qualms about examining the class divisions so apparent in Dickens’ day. In fact, from the opening, wonderfully choreographed, number of Food Glorious Food, you can see the silhouettes of the well-fed upper-class dining above the starving children asking for more; the contemporary parallels are obvious but not overstated.
Evans is very much an actor’s director, and as usual, he draws some wonderful performances from his cast, the young performers in particular. Jack Skilbeck-Dunn (alternating with another young actor for the length of this production), in his debut stage performance, captures the title character’s innocence and delicacy; his singing voice could break the hardest of hearts, while Jack Armstrong makes for a cheeky and likeable Artful Dodger. All of the child actors – chosen from local school around Sheffield – hold their own.
Of the adult performers, Tom Edden plays Fagin as a grim child-catcher, balancing out the character’s more unsavoury elements with some nicely timed comic moments, and Ben Richards is properly frightening as the psychopathic Bill Sikes – to the extent that he’d booed in the curtain call. Among a strong cast, Hayley Gallivan stands out as Nancy. She’s simply terrific, brassy, bold yet also capable of tenderness when required. She delivers the night’s show-stopping moments: the moving As Long As He Needs Me, and the riotous second half opener Oom-Pah-Pah.
The songs are brilliantly performed and the choreography a delight, particularly that of Consider Yourself and the giddy I’d Do Anything. Edden’s rendition of Fagin’s Reviewing The Situation is another highlight. It’s all incredibly well-drilled which is particularly impressive given the fact that the majority of the cast are schoolchildren.
Oliver! is a show of tremendous energy and charm – the kind of thing you want to run out and book yourself another trip to see before the end of its run – it’s that good.
