Oliver!

A Little of What You Fancy

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Mrs Brown You’ve Got a Lovely

Daughter

Les Bicyclettes de Belsize Popdown

April

Lionel Bart’s stage musical Oliver! was in rehearsal on 28 June 1960, two days before its opening night. The show’s choreographer Malcolm Clare had just departed because his routines had been altered, his place taken by Eleanor Fazan, who was mostly associated with the fast-moving, ever-fluent staging of intimate revues. It was probably reckoned that Fazan’s use of movement rather than dance was what was needed to preserve the integrity of the production. Ron Moody, himself a refugee from intimate revue and now cast as Charles Dickens’s arch-villain Fagin, agreed ‘with the result that no conventional choreography has been used at all – it is the flow of groups on the mobile set [designed by Sean Kenny] that Peter [Coe] has aimed at’. Kenny’s skeletal, flexible set itself marked a sea-change in the physical presentation of musicals in the 1960s, an attempt to shift the British musical’s attitude to conventional choreographed sequences. Their removal emphasised the fact that Bart’s show was essentially a modest affair, its songs in the clear light of day uncomplicated and accompanied by a small orchestral ensemble. Transferred to the screen, Bart’s homage to Dickens frequently exploded into what we might regard as artificial dance. The straightforwardness of what had happened on stage was to some extent sacrificed to elephantine magnification, but there is much to be grateful for in the filmed Oliver! produced by John Woolf, adapted by Vernon Harris from Bart’s original stage adaptation, and directed by Carol Reed. George Perry, describing Reed’s ‘lively image of early Victorian London’, reminds us that ‘The film was greeted more enthusiastically in the United States than in Britain, but Ron Moody’s gaunt Fagin was favourably compared with Alec Guinness’s in the David Lean version of twenty years earlier.’ Moody retains his very special place in the history of both the stage and screen versions. His revealing autobiography barely mentions the film, but throws a sharp light on the piece itself and thus the film, supported by extracts from the diaries that he maintained at the time.