"Oliver' at the Walnut

The comedian Alan King once took his elderly mother to see Fiddler On The Roof, presuming that she'd enjoy a musical evocation of a Russian shtetl just like the one she knew as a child. When he asked her afterward whether the show brought back memories, his mother replied, "'It was wonderful, only I don't remember so much singing.''

Therein lies the essential flaw in Broadway's continuing musical infatuation with the lower classes. To Hobbes the life of man was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," but if he'd been fed a steady diet of Les Misérables, Oliver, Sweeney Todd, Mary Poppins, Annie, Porgy and Bess or West Side Story, Hobbes might well have envied the urban poor for their high spirits, their loyal friendships and their cheerful facility for turning life's lemons into lemonade.

Even as I write, no doubt, some latter-day Lionel Bart is putting the finishing touches on a rollicking musical about life in Camden's public housing projects, complete with break-dancing mamas happily dodging the stray bullets of pistol-packin' teen gangs.

History's great survivors

To be sure, this is the great genius of musical theater: the retrospective ability to endow history's great survivors— the downtrodden— with nobility and wit they never realized they possessed because they lacked the time or energy for reflection. My mind continues to boggle at the thought that two of the greatest Broadway musicals of all time— Fiddler and West Side Story— took their material from the obscure and petty communities of my own personal origin.

But this underdog ennoblement schtick also becomes formulaic after a while. The Walnut Street Theatre's Dickensian 19th-Century set for Oliver could work serviceably for Les Miz or Sweeney Todd, and so could many of its characters. The rousing "Oom-pah-pah" song in the Three Cripples Pub could easily be transplanted to Thenardier's inn in Les Miz. In the hands of a commercial repackager like the Walnut, the formula inevitably includes rotating props, characters whose costumes are more colorful than they are, and choreography that substitutes athletic energy and noise for artistic finesse— dancers on tabletops, women jumping into men's arms, that sort of thing. It's kind of like a restaurant that turns up the background music to distract attention from its pedestrian dishes.

Poverty as a minor inconvenience

The original Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens was above all an exposé of an oppressive underworld, sprinkled with colorful characters to hold the reader's attention. In Lionel Bart's musical version, the colorful characters and songs damn near overwhelm Dickens's message: Here on the musical stage, grinding poverty becomes merely a minor inconvenience. The heroine Nancy may be murdered by her thuggish lover Bill Sikes, but a few scenes later she's forgotten as the pumped-up audience claps rhythmically to a post-curtain reprise of "Consider Yourself."

Of course great performances can cover a multitude of sins. But with merely competent performances, like those in this Walnut Street production, you begin to notice cracks in the show's underlying structure. Mr. Bumble's courtship of and marriage to the Widow Corney, for example, is irrelevant to the story of the abused pauper child Oliver Twist. On the other hand, the character of Oliver's grandfather, Mr. Brownlow— who is relevant— is never developed. Dialogue lines like, "You wouldn't know quality if you saw it" aren't exactly pithy. And you begin to notice that many of Lionel Bart's tunes are undistinguished, their lyrics pointless and repetitive, as in "We'll Be Back Soon" and the aforementioned "Oom-Pah-Pah."

A memory of Munshin

I first saw Oliver in 1966 in a national touring production that starred Jules Munshin as Fagin. At the time, Munshin was a fading semi-famous movie actor/dancer, perhaps best known as the sidekick to Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra in On the Town and Take Me Out to the Ball Game. The venue was Emens Auditorium in Muncie, Indiana, a huge theater three times the size of the Walnut. My wife and I sat at the very back of the main floor. Yet I still remember Munshin's magical mincing dance steps as he sang "You've Got to Pick A Pocket or Two." At the Walnut this week I sat much closer but saw no one who could dance like Munshin, or anything else so memorable.

As I said, this is a competent production, and even a jaded old codger like me found a few small pleasures here. "That's Your Funeral" was a delightfully executed ensemble. "Who Will Buy?" was a lovely and almost moving ensemble, with clear voices that reflected the clear beauty of an early morning. Hugh Panaro as Fagin captured the amusing self-parody of "Reviewing the Situation." A few actors— Mary Martello as Widow Corney, Denise Whelan as the undertaker's wife, Mrs. Sowerberry— managed to raise my spirits in minor roles.

Where's the beef?

But too often Bart's original gets trampled beneath all the raucous hyperactivity. The mortuary scene in Act I, for example, holds the potential to build small absurdities upon each other until they reach a peak of ridiculous hilarity. Young Oliver, having been sold by Bumble to the undertaker Sowerberry as a professional mourner, proves incorrigible, and the Sowerberrys demand their money back from Bumble. Bumble in turn blames Mrs. Sowerberry for feeding the boy meat rather than gruel, which would have kept him docile. What follows is a madcap scene in which the mortuary is wrecked by the adults' pursuit of Oliver, ultimately leaving Bumble to shout reprovingly at Mrs. Sowerberry, "Meat, madam! Meat!" before storming out.

Bumble did utter those farewell lines on opening night at the Walnut, but his words were drowned out by the frenzy as well as the musicians. If Hobbes were in the audience, I suppose he'd conclude that the life of man is nasty, brutish, short and noisy, too.