‘Oliver!’ Returns, With Darker Twists Intact

Underscoring the musical’s darker bits, deBessonet said, like the fear and loneliness the orphaned Oliver experiences, was a matter of subtraction rather than addition. Without elaborate sets or showstopping production numbers there are fewer elements competing to divert the audience’s attention from the words of the actors.

But neither did the production need to amp up the grim with foreboding lighting or a fog machine, she said — the darkness is already inherent in Dickens’s text, and in Bart’s book, score and lyrics.

“We’re trying to have those words be heard with the belief that the complexity is in the lyric itself,” she said.

One example, she said, is the titular tune “Oliver!,” a song familiar to many, even those who haven’t seen the show, for its high-spirited chorus.

“It’s this really bouncy song,” deBessonet said, “but the actual lyrics are:

There’s a dark, thin, winding stairway

Without any banister

Which we’ll throw him down and feed him on cockroaches

Served in a canister.

The show does preserve many of the musical’s more lighthearted elements. Every song from the original Broadway production remains, including bouncy numbers like “I’d Do Anything” and “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two.” The dreamlike sequence “Food, Glorious Food,” with its visions of sausages and mustards, jelly and custard. And 20 additional performers, all New York City public school students, will join the company onstage for “Consider Yourself,” the boys’ full-voiced embrace of Oliver into their ranks — the first true family he has known.

“The show is incredibly challenging — the domestic violence, the treatment of children at that time in general is truly harrowing,” deBessonet said. “And yet there’s this buoyant joy about these numbers.”