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: Rent

I have my own theories as to why one of Broadway's biggest-ever hits only ever had modest success in the UK, and although I've seen Rent twice before, this is the first time I've seen what could be called a "straightforward" production in this country: I saw the notorious Rent Remixed, which must still serve as the gold standard of "so bad it's good," and the one time I have seen it played straight was the 2011 off-Broadway revival, in which the audience could be described as... very much what you might imagine an American audience to be. So it's interesting to see this 20th anniversary touring production played more or less as written to a British crowd, although clearly one made up largely of established fans. Technically an adaptation of the Puccini opera La Bohème, Jonathan Larson's rock musical is an ensemble piece set in New York's "alphabet city" in the mid-nineties, with the AIDS crisis still in full swing.