Review Roundup: Did OLIVER! Leave Audiences Wanting More?

Cameron Mackintosh’s new production of Lionel Bart’s iconic musical, OLIVER!, which he has fully reconceived with director and choreographer Matthew Bourne, has now opened at the Gielgud Theatre.

The cast includes Simon Lipkin (Guys and Dolls, Avenue Q) as Fagin, Shanay Holmes (Miss Saigon, The Bodyguard) as Nancy, Aaron Sidwell (Henry VI, Wicked) as Bill Sikes and Philip Franks (The Rocky Horror Show, Witness for the Prosecution) as Mr Brownlow.

With a sensational score, including "Food Glorious Food", "Consider Yourself", "You’ve Got to Pick-a-Pocket or Two", "I’d Do Anything", "Oom Pah Pah", "As Long As He Needs Me" and many more, the Olivier, Tony and Oscar-winning masterpiece vividly brings to life Dickens’ ever-popular story of the boy who asked for more.

What did the critics think?

Photo Credit: Johan Persson

Aliya Al-Hassan, BroadwayWorld: Simon Lipkin has built up a solid body of work over the years, but his Fagin is surely a career-defining moment. Much younger, more vibrant and channelling something of Captain Jack Sparrow, Lipkin conveys the character with real knowingness. He is very comedic, with deliberate breaking of the fourth wall, but we also see an unsure and lonely man behind the mask.

Marianka Swain, London Theatre: Among the wonderfully Dickensian eccentrics and grotesques, vivid characters all, are Oscar Conlon-Morrey’s preening (and often show-stealing) Mr Bumble, Katy Secombe as his eager paramour Widow Corney, and Stephen Matthews and Jamie Birkett’s creepily gothic Sowerberrys – another couple made in heaven, or perhaps hell. Billy Jenkins is an excellent Artful Dodger, with his cheeky-chappie swagger and dynamic moves, and Isabelle Methven is a sweetly gentle Bet.

Sarah Crompton, WhatsOnStage: Brotherston’s set of gantries and iron stairways turns on a revolve, emphasising the bustle and vastness of the city but allowing vivid vignettes to emerge within it; Bourne’s choreography sets the boys in the orphanage scrubbing the stage in fierce unison until the moment of frozen suspense when Oliver dares to ask for more. Later, in routines such as It’s A Fine Life and Consider Yourself, their movement is both fierce (with beaten cups and feet) and childlike (as they imitate horses). Everything adds to the telling of the story in the most compressed and clearest way.

Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph: Much of the show’s capacity to hold an audience enraptured rests on the tender shoulders of the juvenile lead. It’s hats off once again (and thrown to the rafters) to Cian Eagle-Service, affecting in Chichester and no less so here. Doubtless the three other lads sharing the role are top-notch too, but this 12-year-old’s expressive face, delicate frame and searing solos mean you couldn’t ask for more, sir. When he finally beams on being taken under the wing of Billy Jenkins’s swaggering Dodger, it’s like winter vanishing.

Adam Bloodworth, City A.M.: Director and choreographer Matthew Bourne has surely opened the musical of the year with his astounding dance sequences. It’s especially the ensemble numbers that are sheer staggering feats of imagination, offering insane levels of detail to bring Victorian London back to life. You forget that there’s a banger literally every five minutes in Lionel Bart’s original score, and Bourne has crafted frenzied, stage-filling brilliance for Food Glorious Food, Oom-Pah-Pah and You’ve Got To Pick A Pocket or Two, somehow finding new life in sequences already famed for their energy.

Neil Fisher, The Times: And Fagin himself? Actors have fumbled for decades with the Jewish tics of the role — get rid or embrace? — but Simon Lipkin’s wonderfully reimagined portrayal goes full kosher and makes something really remarkable (and very funny) out of the old vagabond. Part lost soul, part sad clown, this Fagin counts his jewels in desperation, not miserly greed (“who’s going to look after me in my old age?” speaks as much today as it ever did) and with his show-stopping Reviewing the Situation, Lipkin captures both the plight of a traumatised immigrant — and of anyone trying to lead a good life in a dark and devious world.

Sam Marlowe, The Stage: Simon Lipkin’s Fagin, a rackety con man with a flair for theatrics, is a scene-stealer, his carapace of ruthlessness, hardened by decades of survival and self-preservation, occasionally cracking to allow some tenderness to seep out, as when he puts the bewildered Oliver to bed at his den’s fireside. Some of his vaudevillian embellishments – particularly in the panicked reckoning of Reviewing the Situation – are a distraction: gags that go for easy laughs when we’d rather engage more fully with Fagin’s dilemma. But it’s unarguably a hugely charismatic performance.

Andrzej Lukowski, TimeOut: The biggest flaw, though, is one that’s haunted the show for decades: Olivier himself is just pretty bland. I’m not going to single out the child actor who was on when I saw it, because I think the problem lies firstly with Bart and secondly with the direction. But our hero is a wide eyed, improbably well-spoken young man who travels through life with such monumental innocence that it’s never even clear here that he’s aware Fagin et al are criminals. It’s a demanding role to give a tween, but the amount resting on his small shoulders has always been a weakness of the show. And clearly it’s not something Mackintosh is desperately bothered about fixing. And why would he? Now booking until next March, the West End’s most successful producer has a hit on his hands with Oliver! Again.

Average Rating: 90.0%