Gil Hates Everything

Well now. If ever there was a musical of two halves, it’s this.

(I seem to be listening to the soundtrack of the movie, but I’m going to extend my comments to take in songs from the stage show.)

This is based on the Charles Dickens novel “Oliver Twist”. An orphan boy called Oliver is in a workhouse in London, is sold to an undertaker to be a professional child mourner, runs away from there, and ends up on the street, where he falls in with a gang of child pickpockets exemplified by a toff-like kid called the Artful Dodger, organized by their secretive leader Fagin. Various adventures ensue, as Oliver meets Nancy, girlfriend of vicious criminal Bill Sikes, and in the end is reunited with his family thanks to a face turn by Nancy, as she tries to save him from Sikes and pays for it with her life.

For space reasons I don’t intend to get into the complexities of the story, the differences between it and the novel, or how Fagin is rewritten as a loveable rogue, and the corresponding issues of anti-semitism that have been raised re the book. Let’s just leave it at “this is an occasionally contentious adaptation, go read the book if you want the original”.

OK, first off let me explain that Oliver is the most fucking annoying child role ever. His every song is a mawkish emetic of distressing proportions. Happily, despite being the title character, he’s not the protagonist; this is really the story of Fagin and Nancy, who believe themselves to have been forced into lives of dubious morality and legality by circumstances, but who have to face up to reality: they have to change to survive. At the third point of the triangle, Sikes, willingly acting like a thug, doesn’t recognize the dangers, goes too far, and pays for it with his life. All the law-abiding characters, while mostly appalling in a Roald Dahl way, are mostly personally helpless, and so the fourth impactful ‘character’ in the story is actually Edwardian society as a whole, and in particular its brutal, one-strike-and-you’re-out law. If not for the fact that you want Oliver to suffer death from hammers at all times, it would actually be a genuinely painful show to watch, because of its relentless portrayal of the iniquities applied to anyone who wasn’t born into the right family.

Let’s talk about the songs. Well now. You know how I mentioned this is a musical of two halves? Let me be more specific. These songs are good: “Food, Glorious Food”, “Boy For Sale” (although I’ll admit to bias here as this part is played by Harry Secombe in the movie), “That’s Your Funeral” (it’s a reasonably promising start, actually) and then “My Name”, “Who Will Buy”, and “Reviewing The Situation”. In fact, you could make a case that “Reviewing The Situation” is one of the best songs ever, something that the American stage could never have produced. The rest of the songs are gruesome. Yes, all of them. And I will shoot you if you disagree. And unfortunately, those good songs aren’t quite good enough to get you through the sticky spots. I mean, “Be Back Soon”? “Oom Pah Pah”? For fuck’s sake. Argh. Panda runs screaming from the auditorium, stubby ears rotating in desperation. It’s not like I haven’t seen the movie and a couple of versions of this on stage, and I’ve had extremely talented friends playing these parts, but they’re still godawful songs.

The overall effect of this musical is to make you want to drink acid and then frantically try to regurgitate it because one of the good songs has unexpectedly cropped up, only for the next scene to make you reach for the bottle all over again. It’s choppier than a kung-fu movie set at sea during a gale, and my recommendation is to see it exactly once and then stick with YouTube for the highlights.

And I mention YouTube because, happily, it has the most awesome clip from the movie, a definitive outdoors staging of “Who Will Buy” which keeps raising the stakes to such an extent that you expect the fucking Queen to come riding through at the end. If it had been set in the present day there would’ve been the Red Arrows hurtling overhead, and possibly the Millennium Wheel spinning like a Catherine wheel. Watch and enjoy. No, really, it’s my pleasure. Here you go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4gzmoUHrQ4 – tolerate the first minute or so, and then watch the genius slow build to 4:20, when suddenly you will find yourself once again eight years old, watching movies on TV, in the safest and happiest place in the world, when everything you saw was new and exciting, and the television was a magic box as big as the universe. And if you had a sucky childhood where that wasn’t the case, do yourself a favour and build a better one for yourself now, and start with this.

Random Panda awards this show five out of ten pieces of bamboo, but if you can find a way to just register Fagin, it goes up to an eight.

(originally posted May 14, 2009)