Theatre review: Oliver!

After a 2024 full of shows with punctuation in the title, the West End gets the OG musical hit in 2025 with the transferring Chichester Festival Theatre production of Lionel Bart's Oliver Exclamation Mark. Charles Dickens' (Chickens to his friends) story of child trafficking, wifebeating, murder, grooming gangs, antisemitism, alcoholism and a quadruple revolve sees Oliver Twist's (Cian Eagle-Service, alternating with Raphael Korniets, Jack Philpott and Odo Rowntree-Bailly) mother die in a Victorian London workhouse giving birth to him. The child is raised there until the age of eleven, at which point he annoys Mr Bumble (Oscar Conlon-Morrey) by politely asking for a second helping of gruel and has to be got rid of. It being a century too early to sell him to a 1970s DJ, Bumble sells him to an undertaker, but soon the boy is back out on the streets.

Theatre review: Quasimodo

Quasimodo means "unfinished," which is ironic because this is how Lionel Bart left his musical adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame on his death, despite having worked on it for decades. As a result, apart from the odd concert performance, the show remained unseen until Robert Chevara's production at the King's Head. The writer of Oliver! may have swapped Dickens' London for Victor Hugo's Paris, but there's still an unmistakeable cockernee sound to the songs, especially the ensemble numbers. Abandoned by his mother as a baby, the physically deformed Quasimodo is taken in by Archdeacon Frollo (James Wolstenholme.) Given the job of bell-ringer at Notre Dame Cathedral, and making his home in the bell tower as well, by the time he's grown up Quasimodo (Steven Webb) is deaf in addition to his twisted bones and scars.