Quintessence Theatre Group presents Lionel Bart's 'Oliver!'

In a program note, director Alexander Burns describes his interpretation of the 1960 musical as “dystopian” and “post-Brexit,” although the staging fails to bear out either notion with any specificity. This has become an unfortunate QTG hallmark: ambitious, intellectual concepts with questionable follow-through.

Consider yourself at home

Like much of Dickens, Oliver! examines economic anxiety, class consciousness, and the human capacity for violence toward society’s weak and wounded. As anyone who glances at a newspaper can attest, these themes have hardly receded in the ensuing 150 years (or the 60 since Bart’s treatment premiered on London's West End). But while this handsomely designed production — with sets by Doug Greene and lighting by Jojo Glodek — catches the eye and moves briskly, it offers little to connect Victorian mores to modern times.

A large segment of the audience flanks the stage area — redesigned here as a skinny catwalk — seated at beer-hall-style tables and benches. Sitting among the crowd, the performers interact, rubbing shoulders and strutting atop the counters. Although this makes smart use of the playing space, it quickly grows gimmicky. If the impetus here is a Brechtian, implicate-the-audience device, it doesn’t go far enough.

Costumes (by Christina Bullard) haphazardly limn styles and periods — at one point, streetwalker Nancy (Hanna Gaffney) appears in a beaded red shimmy dress that might have been plucked from the deepest regions of Liza Minnelli’s closet. Even at his dirtiest and most forlorn, young Oliver Twist (on opening night Lyam David-Kilker, who alternates with Benjamin Snyder) is made to look angelic and adorable.

Consider yourself part of the furniture

Although the design team attempts a high-concept gloss on the musical’s macro themes, they neglect some of its more problematic elements. In particular, very little is done to examine and address the show’s dubious gender politics. After all, this is a musical with a famous number, “As Long as He Needs Me,” that functions primarily as a paean to physical and emotional abuse.

It’s not Burns’s fault that Bart renders Nancy as a self-sacrificing punching bag, a woman who sings moments after her first entrance, “You sometimes do come by / the occasional black eye / you can always cover one / till he blacks the other one / but you don’t dare cry.” To her credit, Gaffney works hard to imbue the character with dignity, in addition to singing very well. But in a moment where women onstage demand to be rethought with some agency, this production mostly punts.

Elsewhere, tonal equivocations result in a show that feels uncomfortably pitched between grim social realism and overstated comedy. Some of the adult performers — particularly Steven Wright and Eleni Delopoulos, both playing a variety of roles — strike a nice balance of humor and pathos, representing the best and worst elements of an unequal society. Conversely, Wallace Acton (as Fagin, the leader of London’s child pickpockets) and the usually wonderful Marcia Saunders wallow in grotesquerie, like refugees from the world of Joe Orton.

As Oliver, David-Kilker gives the kind of cranked-up, cutesy performance one expects from a professional child actor. Winking and smiling broadly to the audience, he never once suggests a boy whose life is a neverending cycle of pain and suffering. The same applies broadly to the large children’s chorus; performing Kaki Burns’s frenetic choreography, they more closely resemble the precocious kiddos you’d find in Matilda the Musical than charity brats.

Although QTG deserves kudos for approaching this fusty material with new eyes, the result remains rather undercooked — not unlike a bowl of workhouse gruel.