Oliver Twist
Adapted by Neil Bartlett from Charles Dickens
Foothill Music Theatre
Upfront, a chorus of the entire cast sings a warning of what is to follow:
“To be sure, it is a work of fiction,
An impossibility, an anomaly, an apparent contradiction;
For it finds hope where all hope was past.”
After all, it is 1837 in an England where the usual fate of young boys of the lower classes was a life of horrific workhouses for mere pennies earned per week, of punishing indentureships leading to nowhere, and probably eventually of crime in dangerous streets in order to survive. And if a boy were an orphan, as was Oliver Twist, in fact to have hope of anything better would normally be fiction at its best, unless he was lucky enough to be created by a certain Charles Dickens.
That famous tale of a boy’s harrowing journey from destitution to finding a loving family and home — first written as a newspaper serial over several years by Dickens — has seen dozens of stage, film, and cartoon adaptations of the celebrated author’s eventual, three volume novel (including the 1960 stage musical Oliver! with songs like “Food Glorious Food” and “Consider Yourself” that have become classics).
In 2004, Neil Bartlett penned a script much darker and grittier that the well-known musical and much more in keeping with Dickens’ original, with his adapted Oliver Twist in fact retaining many of the actual words of Dickens. With a cast of thirteen who each play multiple parts, Foothill Musical Theatre ambitiously stages Neill Bartlett’s adapted Oliver Twist in a production in which two dozen scenes compress the massive novel into short vignettes that do not shy from focusing on the somber, harsh, and oft-abusive conditions of Victorian England.
Please continue to Talkin’Broadway for the rest of my review.
Rating: 3.5 E
Oliver Twist continues through June 7, 2026, in a two-hour (one intermission) production by Foothill Music Theatre at the Lohman Theatre, 12345 El Monte Road, Los Altos Hills, CA. Tickets are available at https://foothill.edu/theatre/music-theatre.html.
Photo Credits: Courtesy of Foothill Music Theatre
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