Underscoring the musical’s darker bits, deBessonet mentioned, just like the concern and loneliness the orphaned Oliver experiences, was a matter of subtraction fairly than addition. With out elaborate units or showstopping manufacturing numbers there are fewer parts competing to divert the viewers’s consideration from the phrases of the actors.
However neither did the manufacturing have to amp up the grim with foreboding lighting or a fog machine, she mentioned — the darkness is already inherent in Dickens’s textual content, and in Bart’s e book, rating and lyrics.
“We’re attempting to have these phrases be heard with the idea that the complexity is within the lyric itself,” she mentioned.
One instance, she mentioned, is the titular tune “Oliver!,” a music acquainted to many, even those that haven’t seen the present, for its high-spirited refrain.
“It’s this actually bouncy music,” deBessonet mentioned, “however the precise lyrics are:
There’s a darkish, skinny, winding stairway
With none banister
Which we’ll throw him down and feed him on cockroaches
Served in a canister.
The present does protect lots of the musical’s extra lighthearted parts. Each music from the unique Broadway manufacturing stays, together with bouncy numbers like “I’d Do Something” and “You’ve Bought to Decide a Pocket or Two.” The dreamlike sequence “Meals, Superb Meals,” with its visions of sausages and mustards, jelly and custard. And 20 extra performers, all New York Metropolis public college college students, will be a part of the corporate onstage for “Contemplate Your self,” the boys’ full-voiced embrace of Oliver into their ranks — the primary true household he has recognized.
“The present is extremely difficult — the home violence, the remedy of kids at the moment on the whole is actually harrowing,” deBessonet mentioned. “And but there’s this buoyant pleasure about these numbers.”