Oliver!
Drury Lane
Roaring Trade
Soho
A show with an exclamation mark in the title has a lot of promises to fulfill. Oliver! opens on a magnificent note. The dark, silkily lit workhouse teems with the figures of stooped orphans who crawl up through the floorboards and march around the shadows like sad doomed little robots. And Julius D’Silva’s Mr Bumble has exactly the right mixture of gravity and silliness.
Then things dip sharply. The funeral parlour scenes are marred by gosh-I’m-funny acting and the flimsy set is a sawn-off afterthought. Oliver’s big solo number ‘Where Is Love?’ comes out querulous and underpowered, possibly because somebody asked Harry Stott to do it lying on his side, propped on one arm. Not ideal if you have to fill a very large theatre and you’re only 12.
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