Before I begin my rant about Lionel Bart’s disturbingly beloved and oozingly british musical, I have to preface with a small complaint: The album cover. Ay yai yai. The tagline is “The Fabulous New [sic] OLIVEr! Cast Recording” with the word Live protruding in red from the text like the alien out of Sigourney Weaver’s stomach. It’s awkward to read and look at. The entire production logo is the 1994 London Production copy and pasted onto a cloudy, dark view of St Paul’s Cathedral. The spires of the cathedral are completely darkened against the sky, and with the upward straight on angle of the shot, and the it kind of just looks like the US capitol strange. Headlining puts Rowan Atkinson, Jodie Prenger (who?), and the 2009 London Cast, but not the kid playing the lead role, in oddly different font sizes, and it is obvious that someone spent less than 10 minutes making this.

Sorry about the rant, it was just really bugging me. As for the actual production, Rowan Atkinson is a cool choice for Fagin, and the role of Nancy is a winner of a UK reality show, okay, and the role of Oliver is rotated by three boys, with one, Laurence Jeffcoate, being recorded here.

I’ll start by saying that I don’t feel that this show, in general, has aged very well. Compared to other heavy hitters from 60 years ago, Sound of Music, West Side Story, Bye Bye Birdie, among others, Oliver has become more and more estranged from the modern human experience as the years have passed by. While the stories in Sound of Music, West Side Story are certainly set in a certain time, the stories of love and perseverance feel timeless in modern productions.

The story of a young orphan boy adopted by an crazy old man named Fagin who raises an platoon of orphaned boy pick pocketers seems… farfetched. Dickens’ original iteration of the story is now almost 200 years old, and makes more sense as social commentary considering London in the early 19th century. Nowadays, and on stage, Fagin’s creepy old man vibes are hard to avoid in this adaptation.

Overall it’s not a terrible recording. I think I prefer older recordings like the 61/62 Broadway/London recordings, or the motion picture soundtrack from 1968. But every once in a while I am in the mood for some Atkinson and listen to Reviewing the Situation.