Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin ****
Some 52 years after its premiere, it is difficult to imagine that Lionel Bart was ever unsure about the potential success of his musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’s orphan classic. The moral sentimentality of the tale makes for perfect musical fare: there are extreme emotions of love, loss and lust; exaggerated personifications of innocence and villainy; and a transformative trajectory for its eponymous hero, from ignoble poverty to privileged prince.
But if Dickens’s source material supplies a natural melodramatic arc, it is Bart’s score that makes the story truly operatic, and he never uses dialogue where a song will do. Numbers such as As Long As He Needs Me and Where is Love? provide emotional texture to Dickens’s one-dimensional protagonists; Oom-pah-pah and Who Will Buy? lend atmosphere, a sense of a working city; Reviewing the Situation and Consider Yourself are pure character sketch. There is a good reason that an audience can sing along: Oliver! has some of the best ensemble numbers in modern musical history.
It is not just familiarity that makes this hardworking Cameron Mackintosh production a success. Laurence Connor’s direction is epic in scope, and Totie Driver and Adrian Vaux bring London to life in astonishing perspective, never more than in the final scene, where the city stretches out into infinity as Fagin struts off to an unknown future.
The ensemble scenes also give a sense of a social world in miniature. However, it is in the intimacy of Fagin’s den, amid his rag-and-bone crew of young thieves, that human life is most successfully evoked. Here, runaway orphan Oliver (an angelic Sebastian Croft) is taught the rules of the street by Fagin (a feral Neil Morrissey) and the Artful Dodger (cheeky-chappie Daniel Huttlestone), and the rules of love and loyalty by Nancy (a sultry and fierce Samantha Barks).
It can be easy to forget just how brutal Dickens’s denouement is.
Innocence is rewarded, yes – Oliver gets his happy ending after all – but honesty is also punished, and no amount of comic levity can detract from the violence of the penultimate scene.
For this reason, Oliver! is perhaps more suitable for the over-eights, despite the child-centred story.
Until January 12th
Outsider
Project Arts Centre, Dublin
Seona MacRéamoinn
In just over 60 minutes, Kyle Abraham, a star in American contemporary dance, brought his audience on a rollercoaster of emotion in this triple bill, revealing a range that veered from the vulnerable to the playful and back again.
Underlying the performances and the dance-making were the subtle contradictions, personal and political, which touched on notions of celebrity and invisibility, community and isolation, power and helplessness, and he did this with a breathtaking fusion of strong muscular dance shot through with delicacy and tenderness.
Abraham performed two solos that opened and closed the programme and in the middle was Outsider, the premiere of a work specially created by Abraham for John Scott’s Irish Modern Dance Theatre. Here, he played not only with fluently blending solos, duets and ensemble phases of dance but with mixing it all up; the space, the rhythm, the genders, the music.
Four fine dancers – Philip Connaughton, Liv O’Donoghue, Ryan O’Neill and Rebecca Reilly, in brightly coloured jeans – were more than able for the quick and often humorous shifts in pace.
The rhythms including Smokey Robinson and The Miracle’s Love Machine triggered sudden swoops and falls, high leg extensions, rolls and almost balletic swivels and undulations, all bearing traces of Abraham’s hip hop cultural origins in the African-American neighbourhood of his Pittsburgh youth and transformed with bravura and grace.
The opening solo Ne Me Quitte Pas, with its trembling muscle and quiet fragility, prepared us a little for the impact of the final piece from this magnetic performer. Here, in a solo from Live, The Realest MC, Abraham is in the spotlight, his well-placed feet grounding the work and bringing us back to his urban roots; all track suits and shape making, shoulders bullishly advancing, or a reverse half pirouette retreating from painful memories.
But casting off his jacket he reveals a silvery sequined vest and the celebrity is exposed, his back swivelling and rippling to the audience.
The show must go on.
Alice in Wonderland
Cork Opera House
Mary Leland
Spectacle triumphs in this Opera House production but not even Enda Kenny as the European caterpillar of the year can disguise the difficulty of uniting the classic story of Alice in Wonderland with the conventions of modern pantomime.
Writer and director Bryan Flynn might be forgiven for attempting a take on Lewis Carroll, but this is more like a burglary, and there isn’t a single joke delivered to catch Carroll’s touch, which is all joke.
The confusion caused by combining the narrative with the darker elements of Through the Looking Glass is exaggerated by unnecessary vulgarity and by a lot of fussy business going on in the background. However, the elaborately enchanting background relates more coherently than the script to the original fantasy.
Laid out on chess-board flooring, the set design by Yvonne Cronin and Michelle Kiely blazes with imaginative allusion and fun, and is beautifully matched by Joan Hickson’s costumes.
And let’s hear it for Jennie Readman, who puts Alice into a wig John Tenniel might have created, and who ensures that all the wigs and make-up look as if grown naturally on each head.
Equally, the lighting design from Michael Hurley and the sound from Peter Crudge flow seamlessly into the always frantic spectacle while Cormac O’Connor’s visual effects provide the kaleidoscopic sequences of entries and exits, vast extensions and dramatic shortenings that are required as Alice falls into wonderland or slides through the looking-glass.
The singing and dancing are among the other wonders in this wonderland, which include the almost ephemeral appearances of the Dodo and the Jabberwock (aka the Dragon of Shandon in obedience to the imperative to drag the story back to Cork).
In the hectic pace set by Valerie O’Leary’s hysterical Red Queen and by Michael Grennell’s relished role as the Knave of Hearts the story-line is sustained by Michael Joseph as the Mad Hatter.
Although this Alice from Claire O’Leary can ratchet her voice to the required screech she actually possesses an appealing sweetness of attitude and tone and sings with charming simplicity, a quality otherwise missing but not missed by the enthusiastic young audience.
Until January 20th
