‘Oliver!’ Returns, With Darker Twists Intact

Underscoring the musical’s darker bits, deBessonet mentioned, just like the worry and loneliness the orphaned Oliver experiences, was a matter of subtraction slightly than addition. Without elaborate units or showstopping manufacturing numbers there are fewer parts 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 mentioned — the darkness is already inherent in Dickens’s textual content, and in Bart’s e book, rating and lyrics.

“We’re attempting to have these phrases be heard with the idea that the complexity is within the lyric itself,” she mentioned.

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

“It’s this actually bouncy track,” deBessonet mentioned, “however the precise lyrics are:

There’s a darkish, skinny, winding stairway

Without any banister

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

Served in a canister.

The present does protect most of the musical’s extra lighthearted parts. Every track from the unique Broadway manufacturing stays, together with 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 college college students, will be a part of the corporate onstage for “Consider Yourself,” the boys’ full-voiced embrace of Oliver into their ranks — the primary true household he has identified.

“The present is extremely difficult — the home violence, the therapy of youngsters at the moment generally is really harrowing,” deBessonet mentioned. “And but there’s this buoyant pleasure about these numbers.”