Who owns oliver the musical

She also shows compassion to Oliver and hangs out with the pickpocket gang. In this award-winning adaptation of the Broadway musical based on the Charles Dickens novel, 9-year-old orphan Oliver Twist Mark Lester falls in with a group of street-urchin pickpockets led by the Artful Dodger Jack Wild and masterminded by the criminal Fagin Ron Moody. When Oliver's intended mark, Mr. Brownlow Joseph O'Conor , takes pity on the lad and offers him a home, Fagin's henchman Bill Sikes Oliver Reed plots to kidnap the boy to keep him from talking.

He had sunk his entire fortune into Twang!! Who is Widow Corney in Oliver? Widow Corney. Widow Corney is a minor antagonist in Oliver Twist. She was a key member of the workhouse staff, she would ring a ball to signal the orphans that it's dinnertime.

In the film when Oliver asks for more food she along with Mr Bumble takes him to see the govorners. Is Oliver the musical on in London? Now in its 2nd record-breaking year, Oliver! Where is Oliver set in London? Oliver Twist is born into a life of poverty and misfortune, raised in a workhouse in the fictional town of Mudfog, located 70 miles km north of London. How does Oliver end? Oliver ends up with what's left of his inheritance, is legally adopted by Mr. Brownlow, and lives down the road from the Maylies.

He did not immediately fulfil her prediction: his screeching attempts to learn the violin were decidedly unsuccessful. Back in London in , he changed his surname to Bart — snappier, easier to spell on credits and less foreign-sounding — and found work at an East End theatre as a producer.

He also began writing songs, earning 25 guineas for the first one published, Oh For A Cup Of Tea, which he blew on a celebratory party. For Lionel, success and excess went hand in hand. It spent five weeks in the charts. He followed this up by co-writing songs for a semi-documentary film starring the singer, The Tommy Steele Story, which won Bart three prestigious Ivor Novello song- writing awards.

He recruited Cliff and his band, The Drifters later The Shadows , to sing three of the songs he had written for a forthcoming film.

One of them was Living Doll. Lionel wrote it in ten minutes and it became a No 1 hit in August He never learned to read or write music — he sang into a tape recorder for someone else to transcribe — and had no formal musical training.

He believed in keeping tunes and lyrics simple. Despite his chart success, he yearned to have his songs performed in the theatre. It was a Cockney comedy. Please sir, can I have some more? Lionel turned it into a musical. It opened in Stratford in February and was an immediate hit, transferring after a year to the West End.

Princess Margaret and the Queen both saw it, despite its risque scenes and dialogue. In , Lionel began work on the songs and story for what would become his masterpiece, Oliver! Eventually, one producer agreed to stage it on a shoestring budget. Despite promising preview performances, on its first night in the West End Lionel sat rigid with fear in the audience.

Petrified that it would be a flop, he bolted out of the theatre. After pacing the streets for more than an hour, he made his way back. As he approached the theatre, he heard a rumbling noise. Fearing that the audience was rioting in disgust, he turned to run.

But the producer grabbed him and dragged him on to the stage. The audience were on their feet, clapping deafeningly. There had been 23 curtain calls. The reviews were ecstatic. The show ran for six years, then a record for a British musical. Overnight, Lionel became phenomenally wealthy. At one point, his song-writing earned him as much in a minute as most people earned in a week.

He spent his new riches freely, drenching himself in his favourite Guerlain perfume, wearing sharply tailored suits and patent leather boots with Cuban heels. He had his beaky, broken nose fixed. He collected cars: a Mercedes-Benz convertible with a built-in telephone this was in the Sixties! Lionel mixed with old showbiz: Judy Garland and Noel Coward became good friends. But personal happiness eluded him.

For years, he squired the singer Alma Cogan, but the relationship was never consummated — for the simple reason that Lionel was gay. He had a long-term boyfriend, then a series of casual lovers, but he did not publicly come out until , four years after homosexuality was legalised. In , he wrote another musical, Blitz! It had an month run, but neither Blitz! Undeterred, in he began writing another musical, Twang!!

Based loosely on the story of Robin Hood, it lacked any coherent storyline or dialogue, possibly because — according to the director — Lionel was high on the hallucinogenic drug LSD. By the time the curtain went down on the first night of Twang!! The critics savaged it. As the investors pulled out, Lionel wrote cheque after cheque from his personal account to keep it going. It was no good. It was an utter flop. Within six years, Lionel had gone from box office gold to poison. Everyone went to see it.

The only theatre show recording we had in the house when I was an Essex teenager, apart from Gilbert and Sullivan, was Oliver!.

Already set on becoming a producer, he joined a national tour of the show soon after leaving drama school and in he revived that original production in the same theatre with Roy Hudd as Fagin. His dedication to Oliver! He is similarly engaged with My Fair Lady, another unabashed appropriation of a masterpiece, Shaw's Pygmalion. Mackintosh puts the show's appeal down to its rich, entertaining characters and its heart, a quality it shares with Bart, who never felt sorry for himself despite his tribulations.

Mackintosh brought the same production back again in for a Christmas season at the Aldwych, and Ron Moody's Fagin, long enshrined in the movie, flickered back to electrifying life, eyes burning like live coals for one critic, and his capering, tattered cloak outstretched in all directions delighting another. The movie version, bursting with jollity, is often dismissively compared with David Lean's wonderful black and white non-musical Oliver Twist, which starred Alec Guinness as Fagin, Robert Newton as Sikes and a young Anthony Newley as the Dodger.

A beguiling small-scale version by the National Youth Music Theatre in suggested that the time might be right for another approach. The "spectacular" elements of Anthony Ward's design did not really earn their keep and a lot of the songs seemed swamped.

Pryce was a dark, malevolent Fagin, but he missed deliberately? Still, what do critics know? This time round, Mackintosh confesses he had initial misgivings about Jodie Prenger's generous curves, but the biggest success in was Sally Dexter's Nancy, and she's no role model for size zero. She blasted her way through the score, and her innate voluptuousness was no bar to turning "As Long As He Needs Me" into the sad valedictory of a literally beaten woman.

So Prenger needn't necessarily stint on the sauce and mayo if the performance is in good order, as Mackintosh now thinks it is. Still, Prenger's comparative inexperience is acknowledged in the cover Mackintosh has provided, with Tamsin Carroll, an award-winning Nancy in Australia, playing Wednesday and Thursday evenings, and Sarah Lark, another I'd Do Anything reject, understudying the role while filling in as one of the street sellers.

Atkinson only agreed to play Fagin — Mackintosh says he's been pestering him for 15 years — after playing the part in his daughter's school production. He's signed up for six months, risking the boredom he dreads of repeating himself each night. The danger — and possible deterrent to an evaluation of Oliver! One envisages hordes of grubby infants marching in military unison in search of bowls of gruel all over Ward's sets, and Atkinson muttering into his beard in search of acting "truth" — or perhaps, after all, he will caper maliciously, and Jewish-joyfully, like Moody?

The stage at Drury Lane is 80ft deep and has, says Mackintosh, given the production team tremendous scope to enlarge the "original concept". Two years ago, the Queen's Theatre in Hornchurch, Essex, on the margins of Bart's East End patch, presented a biographical songbook in his memory. The greatest impression, apart from the warmth and humanity of the material, was the easy colloquialism of the writing. After Oliver! But then, in , everything went belly up with his doomed Robin Hood musical Twang!!

Littlewood left, Bart took over the direction and footed the whole bill himself; he lost the lot. Another botched project, a Broadway stab at Fellini's La Strada, closed on its second night in Littlewood left Britain for good in she died 30 years later and Bart provided a few painfully unmemorable songs for her last show at Stratford East, Costa Packet, a fairly predictable take on the new tourist package industry.

Bart, the darling of the Sixties who hobnobbed with Princess Margaret, Judy Garland and Liberace, and whose house was Kubla Khan in Kensington with two huge glass urns on permanent offer to guests, one full of cocaine, the other full of money , simply withdrew from the fray, like some modern-day Timon of Athens. He was bankrupt, diabetic and alcoholic.