Oliver! London musical review: Please, sir: give me more of this five-star hit
Oliver! London musical review and star rating: ★★★★★
One of the surest ways to confirm a new musical is a hit? It has a song with more refrains than you could ever possibly imagine. In the last few years in London, productions of 42nd Street and Anything Goes have had this – and it happened tonight in Oliver!
In this new production of Lionel Bart’s musical, ‘Consider Yourself’ has such a depth of choreography and is so rambunctiously full of life you wish you could be prescribed it as medicine for when you believe nothing could cheer you up. Reader, this will.
It’s just one worthy mention in a new production so jam packed with spine tingling moments you worry your dopamine levels will peak so high that it’ll all be downhill from here and you’ll never experience happiness like it again.
Oliver! London: musical is an early contender for show of the year
In many ways, this production is confident enough not to reinvent. This is classic, nostalgic Oliver!, with a conventionally dour set amalgamating Victorian backstreets to spectacular effect.
But then again there is stunning reinvention: director and choreographer Matthew Bourne has surely opened the musical of the year with his astounding dance sequences. It’s especially the ensemble numbers that are sheer staggering feats of imagination, offering insane levels of detail to bring Victorian London back to life. You forget that there’s a banger literally every five minutes in Lionel Bart’s original score, and Bourne has crafted frenzied, stage-filling brilliance for Food Glorious Food, Oom-Pah-Pah and You’ve Got To Pick A Pocket or Two, somehow finding new life in sequences already famed for their energy.
He’s also good at slowing down, bringing wonderfully evocative solos on moodily backlit and stripped-back stages. For instance, as Nancy, Shanay Holmes is gently mesmeric, belting unbelievably for As Long As He Needs Me.
It’s stuffed full of brilliant performances, not least Billy Jenkins’ wonderfully physical Arthur Dodger; Oscar Conlon Murray (who I loved in Mother Goose) gives a pristinely camped-up, especially lecherous Mr Bumble who is absolutely hilarious (I could listen to him enunciate for days) and then there’s Aaron Sidwell’s horribly violent Bill Sykes.
I wasn’t sure about Simon Lipkin’s Fagin, who feels like the sort of zany hippy you might happen upon on a beach in Thailand and while away the afternoon with rather than someone you’d find lurking down a back alley. But I found myself studying his Fagin nonetheless, questioning my own sense of how the character conveys his perverse kindness.
Random strangers were giving each other knowing smiles as we exited – the type of looks that say ‘this is a hit.’ What a way to start the year!
Oliver! plays at the Gielgud Theatre until March 2026