Marc Napolitano

A few weeks ago, I chanced across an online copy of Marc Napolitano's doctoral thesis about the musical "Oliver!" and decided to start reading.

This caused me to realize that there was a lot more back story to the musical than I realized, and that set me searching for more information. The first thing I found was this book, a newer publication that is quite different from the thesis although it naturally covers some of the same topics. It's a look at how "Oliver!" the musical has influenced our perception of Oliver Twist the book -- and, indeed, of Charles Dickens the author, and of the Victorian era.

Let's start with a crucial point: Oliver Twist is a much darker and more complicated -- and repetitious -- book than is the musical. It's not just that the musical is necessarily shorter. Oliver Twist is a very direct expose of the underside of Victorian society, with an anonymous narrator who makes it very clear just how bad he thinks things are. And it is full of very dark characters, not just Bill Sikes and Mr. Bumble but also Fagin and, indeed, even Nancy, the woman we tend to think of as the heroine. (And, incidentally, Fagin's gang is much smaller than portrayed in the musical.)

A lot of the complications truly did have to go out of the musical. We didn't need, e.g., two interludes where Oliver gets adopted into polite society (first by Brownlow and then by the Maylies). We certainly didn't need the absurd situation where Oliver's first adversary Noah Claypole and his girlfriend end up talking to the criminals. Most Dickens works frankly get better for being edited down. Oliver Twist is emphatically a case in point.

But was it necessary to turn Fagin -- whom Dickens constantly reminds is is "the Jew" -- from (in effect) the boss of a gang of juvenile thugs into (in effect) a boy scout leader who just happens to fence items his boys chance to pick up in the streets? It's an interesting question. For Lionel Bart -- Jewish, gay, and lower class -- it probably was necessary. And with that change, much else had to change -- and, in many ways, change for the better. Some critics complain that "Oliver!" lacks the social commentary of Oliver Twist. This is an understandable but, I think, unfair charge; we can, if we are willing to look, see what the workhouse does to the children there. If we don't, it's on us, not Lionel Bart!

If there is true fault in that regard, it's in the movie made from the musical. This takes Bart's lighter-hearted version of Dickens and further Disneyfies it. Some of this is just stupidity: some of the songs (notably "Consider Yourself," but also "It's a Fine Life" and others) are so stretched out by excessive choreography that they lose a lot of their appeal. And it takes Bart's ambiguous ending for Fagin and makes it unquestionably happy -- in the book, the Artful Dodger is transported and Fagin is hanged, and even in the musical, Fagin loses his home and his gang and must rebuild his life, but in the movie reunites Fagin and the Dodger and lets them go off about their adventures. The fact that the movie managed a few improvements to the plot does not justify this bollixing of the emotions of the ending (or the cutting of several songs). And Napolitano (who probably grew up with the movie, as I did not) does not seem to see that. This is the one thing that I find really lacking in Napolitano's analysis. A great work of art must give us both enough sadness to feel deeply and enough happiness to survive it. The book has too much of the sadness; the movie too little. Bart's original work is a tragedy -- a true tragedy, for all Oliver's workhouse comrades are still orphans, and Nancy is dead -- but it is a resolved tragedy: Nancy's death saved Oliver and broke up Fagin's gang. The movie is not a tragedy at all; we like Nancy, we can forget her among the too-happy endings.

That's enough about my pet peeve. This isn't a book about the movie. It's a book in part about how Lionel Bart came to write what he did -- his plot emphases, and how the actors (especially Ron Moody, the first Fagin) made that come to life. It's also about "Oliver!" the phenomenon -- a phenomenon that started in 1960 but lasted well after the making of the movie in 1968, as the revivals show. This book well documents how "Oliver!" helped reshape British musical theater, and how it started a new Dickens trend. There are a few other topics I wish Napolitano had pursued a little farther (just what was so utterly terrible about Bart's flop "Twang!!" anyway? And what further reading should we be doing? There is a bibliography, but it's very long, and mostly very hard to access, and there is no recommended reading list). But, on the whole, I found this a very interesting read -- and an excellent chance to remember one of the most memorable, and indeed one of the most tuneful, musicals of all time.… (más)