‘Oliver!’ Returns, With Darker Twists Intact

Underscoring the musical’s darker bits, deBessonet stated, just like the concern and loneliness the orphaned Oliver experiences, was a matter of subtraction relatively than addition. Without elaborate units or showstopping manufacturing numbers there are fewer components competing to divert the viewers’s consideration from the phrases of the actors.

But neither did the manufacturing have to amp up the grim with foreboding lighting or a fog machine, she stated — the darkness is already inherent in Dickens’s textual content, and in Bart’s guide, rating and lyrics.

“We’re trying to have those words be heard with the belief that the complexity is in the lyric itself,” she stated.

One instance, she stated, is the titular tune “Oliver!,” a tune acquainted to many, even those that haven’t seen the present, for its high-spirited refrain.

“It’s this really bouncy song,” deBessonet stated, “but the actual lyrics are:

There’s a dark, thin, winding stairway

Without any banister

Which we’ll throw him down and feed him on cockroaches

Served in a canister.

The show does preserve many of the musical’s more lighthearted elements. Every song from the original Broadway production remains, including bouncy numbers like “I’d Do Anything” and “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two.” The dreamlike sequence “Food, Glorious Food,” with its visions of sausages and mustards, jelly and custard. And 20 extra performers, all New York City public faculty college students, will be part of the corporate onstage for “Consider Yourself,” the boys’ full-voiced embrace of Oliver into their ranks — the primary true household he has recognized.

“The show is incredibly challenging — the domestic violence, the treatment of children at that time in general is truly harrowing,” deBessonet stated. “And yet there’s this buoyant joy about these numbers.”