The Tennessee Repertory Theatre is having a Dickens of a December. Over at Opryland’s Roy Acuff Theatre, the company is mounting a production of the Dickensian seasonal favorite A Christmas Carol, while at TPAC, it’s pulling in big crowds with a staging of Lionel Bart’s ever popular mine of songs, Oliver!.
It is, of course, a bit late in the day to point out the very real weaknesses of Oliver!. To be fair to Bart, Oliver Twist is very long work, filled with character and nuance. Boiling Dickens’ layers of event and personality into a book that can support the range of expected songs, scenes, and dance numbers must have been a daunting task. Bart’s redaction, however, went a little overboard. With the exception of Fagin perhaps, none of the characters’ personalities develop throughout the course of the show; consequently, none of them are much more rounded than Punch and Judy.
Bart’s music for these stock characters and situations is very good stock music, but it’s stock music nonetheless. Like those suitcase arias written for inclusion into any old opera a diva might have been performing, many of the songs in Oliver! could just as well have been used in any other contemporary musical. All the big hits from Oliver! have had a full life independent of the show, but when seen in context it’s surprising how derivative this stuff seems. “As Long As He Needs Me” becomes a poor cousin of “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine”; “Who Will Buy?” is a rip-off of the morning scene from Porgy and Bess; and “Where Is Love?”—although given to a young boy here—could have been given to any ingenue from any Gershwin show.
Then there’s the damned relentless cheeriness of it all. Perhaps my scrooginess is showing, but I wanted to unleash a barrage of “humbugs” when those little workhouse tykes kicked up their heels in the big production number for “Food, Glorious Food,” or when the Artful Dodger started bouncing around the stage to “Consider Yourself.”
The Rep’s Oliver! largely dealt with these problems by ignoring them. Characterizations kept on the sunny side, even in the bleakest situations. Songs were put over more than sung, and the musical pace was relentless. Ginger Newman’s Nancy was an excellent example of this. Ms. Newman, last encountered at the season opener of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra’s Pops season, here confirmed an initial impression as a fine song plugger. The words were there; the music was there; it was delivered on pitch. The operative word, however, is “deliver”—Newman came across more like a cabaret singer belting out a standard than a character sharing a revealing moment.
Brandon Conger’s Oliver also suffered from this incessant push. It didn’t help that he also played the role with an absolute innocence that would have rendered him dead meat on the streets of early Victorian London. Robert Jensen’s Bill Sykes was also problematic. Here is a truly evil role, but Jensen absolutely failed to bring off any of Sykes’ menace and depravity. This Sykes was a bully, but not much more.
It was the small characters—the ones who could be played as stock roles—who shone in this production. Tad Ingram’s Fagin is a principal role, granted, but his character is so eccentric that he becomes simply a prototype of criminal eccentricity. And yet Ingram’s way with Fagin’s miserliness and his very subtle “Pick a Pocket or Two” were two of this production’s best aspects. Nan Gurley’s Widow Corney was equally splendid. Her comedic talents made her time onstage a delight, and her shaping of the Widow Corney’s musical material made me wish that she had been tapped for the role of Nancy. Finally, in the “there are no small roles” category, Travis Harmon managed, in his few moments onstage, to delineate perfectly the oiliness and false gentility of Mr. Sowerby the undertaker.
If I found that too much of this Oliver! lay on the surface, I must admit that the surface was very well brought off. In its decorative and technical aspects, this was a remarkable production. Only huge theaters with much stage machinery could have made scene changes any more smoothly. There was not a member of the cast, it seemed, who did not help to set the stage during blackouts, and the sets, far more than the action, aptly portrayed the nightmarish corrosiveness of poverty.
Dance numbers were more than competently done by all involved, but the big set pieces—“Consider Yourself,” “Who Will Buy,” “Pick a Pocket or Two,” and “Oom-Pah-Pah”—were all notable for their layers of movement and interest. So much was going on, even on the Polk Theater’s small stage, that it was hard to take it all in. Musical direction was relentless as well: Nothing flagged, not even for a moment. The pit band, under Tom Mitchell’s direction, was efficient.
The one technical problem of the evening was the sound system. It had its usual problems—sound cutting in and out, peculiar patterns of amplification, even stretches when it failed to work at all. TPAC needs to get this PA system fixed.
As noted at the beginning, the crowds for Oliver! have been big. This is one production that seems to be a family affair—indeed, the children in the audience were far better behaved than their habitually late-arriving elders. Even with its faults, the color and excitement of this production make The Rep’s Oliver! a good choice for a holiday outing.
Comments (0)