Review: 'Oliver Twist,' a Very Good Boy

Put your image of a hungry boy to rest, and let yourself be overcome with the gritty new Oliver Twist polishing off the Berkeley Rep's 2006-07 with style!

Every bit of the classic has gone through the meat-grinder and spit out into a fully reformed work of art.  Neil Bartlett inventively directs a focused 13-person cast who walk hand-in-hand with a clever creative team.  Dickens' original text sulks alongside eerie musicianship and bio-mechanical movement, making for a thoroughly engaging evening.  It's story-telling done right, steered by characters in a world of wrong.

When the tattered curtain rises, a dozen shivering black-robed persons stare past the footlights from inside a life-size diorama; blinking and barely breathing in a chiaroscuro-lit box.  Then, in one ensemble voice, these creatures singing in tight harmony (sans melody) tell us we will see "a work of fiction, an anomaly" whose moral, if in doubt, is of the nature of good and evil.

In the opening sequence, we see the actors standing on tip-toes anticipating their cue at the finger-snap of the narrator, John Dawkins (played spot-on by Carson Elrod).  Next in a whirl of audible gasps, they form a soup-kitchen while plates clatter, wooden boards bang, pots clang – and freeze! The play carries onward making one great visual-picture after another.  Pictures shaped by Barlett's skilled hands and the devotion and precision of each actor.

Elrod shines amidst the grimy-set as both narrator and (in a sexy and sly change of costume, voice, and posture) The Artful Dodger.  His youthful charm is contagious and big-brotherly attention to each second of the piece is praiseworthy – the criminal activity is not! 

Remo Airaldi and Karen MacDonald are hilarious as the dark-spirited Bumbles.  Airaldi's penguin-waddle beside MacDonald's whip-wielding make perfect caricatures. Likely blue-prints to the other theatrical orphan-collectors, the Thenardiers of Les Mis.

Michael Wartella hushes the house with squeaky lines and earns the "awww" factor in each unhappy twist of Oliver's fate.  What's most intriguing in Wartella's performance is the lack of control he has in his own shoes.  That is, Bartlett's Oliver is literally carried, propped, and dropped about stage much like Dickens' literary Oliver is dragged from home to hole to hell. 

Each Twist character is as exaggerated as the next.  This dirty, calamitous, radiant, and inspiring ensemble collaboration is but one example: what has been created as a whole is far more astounding than any singular performance.

This gothic world pulses with Rae Smith's stripped and functional Obie Award-winning set and costume designs.  Footprint splattered walls, cranks, secret compartments, and dulled colors keep this puzzling London dark and creepy.

Gerard McBurney's Drama Desk Award nominated original music is hair-raising.  The scream of a violin, the burst of the odd serpentine and the relentless grinding of the hurdy-gurdy weave through game-play of pit-pockets and property of pseudo-do-gooders. 

Pervaded by an overwhelming need to keep the boy safe, the audience feels both helpless and fully engaged with this tragic and heroic tale.  While mostly a victim of circumstance, we are finally assured Oliver is a good boy; a very good boy.  Appropriately, Bartlett and Berkeley Rep's Oliver Twist is a good show; a very good show.

Oliver Twist: adapted from the novel by Charles Dickens, directed by Neil Bartlett, music by Gerard McBurney at Berkeley Rep's Roda Theatre through June 24. 2-hours and 20-minutes with one 15-minute intermission. Tickets ($22.50-$61) are available at www.berkeleyrep.org or 510-647-2949.  Berkeley Rep is located at 2015 Addison St., Berkeley.

Photos by Kevin Berne:  (top) Michael Wartella as Oliver and Carson Elrod as The Artful Dodger; (middle) Remo Airaldi and Karen MacDonald as The Bumbles; (bottom) Lucas Steele, Steven Boyer, Elizabeth Jasicki, Craig Pattison as Thieves.

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