'Oliver!' musical review, Quarry, Leeds Playhouse

Theo Wake is one of three boys playing Oliver

(Image credit: Alastair Muir/Leeds Playhouse)

published 7 December 2023

It's more than 60 years old, but "Oliver!" has never stopped delighting audiences – and for good reason, said Tom Millward on What's On Stage. It is, of course, blessed with Dickens' gripping plot about the beleaguered orphan who makes his way to London and winds up in the hands of Fagin and his gang of thieving urchins; but on top of that, it has Lionel Bart's almost unrivalled run of show-stoppingly brilliant songs. The likes of "Food, Glorious Food", "Where Is Love?", "Consider Yourself", "Pick a Pocket or Two", "Oom-Pah-Pah", "I'd Do Anything" and "Reviewing the Situation" are just so memorable, and so "beloved", people never tire of them.

You couldn't really call "Oliver!" festive, with its focus on poverty, criminal gangs and domestic violence, said Mark Brown in The Daily Telegraph. But if James Brining was taking a risk in choosing Bart's great musical as his first big Christmas show at the Leeds Playhouse, then it has been "rewarded marvellously". The "universally excellent cast" brims with talented child actors, not least (on press night) Nicholas Teixeira as a "remarkably sympathetic and vulnerable" Oliver and Felix Holt as a "cocky, yet, ultimately, anguished" Dodger. There are equally fine performances from Steve Furst as Fagin, Jenny Fitzpatrick as Nancy and Chris Bennett as Bill Sikes. And the "clever, minimal design" (by Colin Richmond) uses numerous platforms and staircases to help generate pace and drama. It is, all told, an "unalloyed triumph".

It's a superb staging of a "glorious" musical, agreed Mark Lawson in The Guardian. Furst's Fagin is a "wry, vigorous eccentric whose only archetype of ethnicity is klezmer-inflected cadenzas on a violin". And in Nancy's numbers, Fitzpatrick "reaches top notes that will be as alarming to theatre-roof insurers" as Nicole Scherzinger's in "Sunset Boulevard". The choreography is great too. There are perhaps too many dances in which Fagin's boys flap "bent-elbowed arms like hen's wings"; but the audience's arms "will be above their heads applauding".