Oliver!

The WMS cast and production team had a lot of problems to cope with on the night I saw the show.  Due to sickness, the part of Mr Bumble was taken by director David Putley, singing admirably and acting from the libretto.  Dodger was played seamlessly by understudy Michael Clarkson.  Then there was nobody to cover for the missing sound operator.  (The company did have someone who was capable of running the desk, but he was on stage playing Fagin.)  I considered volunteering, but decided that discretion was a better option, since it would have been quite easy to ruin the audience’s enjoyment of the show by inappropriate setting of a large and complex sound desk.

As it happens, the company coped very well.  From my seat near the front, I could hear everything, with only Fagin’s counterpoint in “Be Back Soon” being overwhelmed by the volume of the chorus.  Further back, some of the soloists would have been a little faint, notably Oliver (Alaric Littleton- Gray), who was at a disadvantage when singing “Where is love?” from a bed on the floor of the stage.

In most productions of Oliver!, the lack of amplification would have shown up in the first song: Food, Glorious Food.  Not in this case.  The Waterside Theatre has limited dressing room facilities - so was not able to provide a separate dressing room for children.  Consequently, the production had chosen to do away with the chorus of urchins, leaving Oliver as the only under-fourteen role.  This meant that the workhouse in the opening scene was peopled with all of the destitute, rather than just children, resulting in a fine, rich sound.  Later on, Fagin’s boys were played by teenagers (lads and girls) and the morning scene was moved to The Three Cripples pub, giving Nancy (the excellent Victoria Sarker) a bigger backing chorus for It’s a Fine Life.

Steve Moulster made a suitably grubby, seedy Fagin, by contrast with whom, Wayne Reddin actually looked a bit clean as Bill Sykes, though all the stalking menace was there, and the murder of Nancy was handled really well.  In my view, Sykes’s death could have been bigger; it is, after all, a very melodramatic scene.  Nevertheless, with the microphones brought to life for the second act, the show went very well indeed, with a set of good supporting performances from the company, good choreography, notably in the pub scenes, and a lot of hard work from Chris Talbot and the three musicians in the pit.

© NODA CIO. All rights reserved.