Without elaborate sets or showstopping production numbers there are fewer elements competing to divert the audience’s attention from the words of the actors.īut 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. 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. When deBessonet, now in her third year as the artistic director of Encores!, was setting the season lineup in late 2021, just before the Omicron surge of Covid-19, she was struck by the parallels between the uncertain present and the perilous world of Dickens’s day. “It’s meaty work for me as a director to figure out how to tell the story with so few elements.” “Because you strip away some of those other production elements, it really puts a new focus on the lyric,” deBessonet said. Although there is an orchestra onstage, props and sets are minimal. “And I think that in some productions, you may just be bobbing along with the rhythm of the song, and you might not really hear those words.”īut that’s generally not the case in the concert-like stagings that Encores! is known for.
“The show has these really harrowing lyrics even in songs that are upbeat,” said the production’s director, Lear deBessonet. It mixes fun, candy-coated musical theater crowd-pleasers like “Food, Glorious Food” and “Consider Yourself” with darker Dickensian themes including poverty and domestic violence. “Oliver!,” based on the Charles Dickens novel “Oliver Twist,” is the story of an orphan’s search for belonging in that band of young pickpockets in 1830s London.
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