Oliver! must die!
My wife, Jenn, and I have season tickets to Broadway in Atlanta at the Fox. Most of the time this doesn’t pose a problem. The exception to this rule was last night’s hideous performance of Oliver! That’s a little harsh, I admit, but watching a bunch of kids try to pull off English accents for the better part of two hours would make anyone cranky.
I guess I just have a problem with any retelling of a Dickens story that cheers up forced casket-sleeping, brutal murder, child thievery or malnutrition with a numbers about “Food, Glorious Food” and “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two”. Guh! Color me unimpressed.
The performances were all fine (save the “urchins”), but I’m just jaded about the perversion of the source material. I guess I should have known better.
Still, though, I can’t help but think that I’d feel better if I beat the tar out of Haley Joel Osment. Maybe if we discouraged impish behavior in child actors, we might all be spared a night at the theatre like I had last night.
Come on … you know how Broadway works. Yes, there are patches of brilliance here or there, but most shows follow the formula of singling out a word, adding an exclamation point and melodifying the unsingable. This turns Oliver Twist into OLIVER! It turns Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats into CATS! Given enough time, I’m sure we’ll see Shakespeare’s ultra-tragic King Lear reduced to LEAR!
When I was 17 I played a couple of roles in a production of Oliver done in Nashville, TN – like Noah Claypole, the undertaker’s assistant who bullies Oliver. Though I wasn’t that much older than the kids in the cast really – they would all be in their 30’s now – I absolutely freaking hated the whole experience, for most of the reasons you did. Except I had to be up there in it. And it was community theater, so I endured the torture for nuthin’. My sympathies go out to you in your distress.