Date/Time: Wednesday, 24th September 2025 at 19:30
Location: Gielgud Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London, W1D 6AR
Price: £66 per person. Member and guest £132.
Event Organiser: Pete Wells. Flat 7, Wayfaring Court, Safflower Lane, Romford RM3 0LQ
Please note: This is an evening performance, commencing at 19:30.
Oliver! has book, music and lyrics by Lionel Bart, freely adapted from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, and is revised by Cameron Mackintosh, and directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne.
Cameron Mackintosh has mounted blockbuster stagings in the past. Here, he’s created a more intimate version that not only evokes the spirit of the 1960 premiere but also treats the story’s trickier aspects with finesse and delicacy.
Matthew Bourne doesn’t stint on themes of social inequality that echo today, but first and foremost he gives us a glorious evening of song and dance. His choreography is tight and exuberant. And the music is outstanding.
The detail in this production is meticulous. Look away from the main action: no one in the background is busking it or marking time. And this Oliver! is darker than most, strafed with rain and suffocated by pea soupers, a place of rank chamber pots and lethal gin. Designer’s Lez Brotherston’s rotating and reconfiguring set of grim gantries and decaying stairwells evokes the Victorian city’s architecture.
Oliver! tells the story of the orphaned Oliver Twist, who escapes the harsh Victorian workhouse and takes refuge in London’s murky underworld with the wily gang leader Fagin and his team of resourceful pickpockets led by the Artful Dodger. He finds a friend in the kind-hearted Nancy and when he’s wrongly arrested for stealing, Oliver meets an unexpected saviour; but is happiness truly within his grasp?
With a sensational score, including ‘Food Glorious Food’, ‘Consider Yourself’, ‘You’ve Got to Pick-a-Pocket or Two’, ‘I’d Do Anything’, ‘Oom Pah Pah’, ‘As Long As He Needs Me’ and many more, this Olivier, Tony and Oscar-winning masterpiece vividly brings to life Dickens’ ever-popular story of the boy who asked for more.
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