THEATER REVIEW SAN GABRIEL CIVIC LIGHT OPERA : On Stage and in Audience, Production of ‘Oliver!’ Spotlights Children

“Oliver!,” the Tony- and Oscar-laureled 1960s musical, has unfurled the San Gabriel Civic Light Opera’s ninth season with a production whose major appeal seems squarely aimed at nostalgia buffs and, particularly, their children.

At least that’s the way the show appears now, 30 years after it first played Los Angeles and went on to be a hit on Broadway and, subsequently, the longest-running musical of the British theater.

But even children and their parents may fidget a bit this time around.

The production, with all the customary SGCLO trimmings--a live, 28-piece pit orchestra in tuxedos, a colorful cast and a vivid set design--is rather lackluster in places.

In others, the pleasures are manifold, ranging from Peter Renaday’s master pickpocket, Fagin, to Michael G. Hawkins’ evil Bill Sikes (the production’s--and Charles Dickens’--richest character, although we unfortunately don’t meet the feral Sikes until the end of the first act).

Perhaps most winning are the 16 starving orphanage wards, known as The Workhouse Boys (singing “Food, Glorious Food!”), who really look like scruffy London waifs instead of San Gabriel Valley schoolchildren. Choreographer Rikki Lugo, in what must have been a taxing assignment, nicely reins in the rapscallions.

And Dustin Mackintosh, whose soprano voice is steady if not always audible, captures the simplicity of the forlorn title character who is tossed from workhouse to thieves den to foster home and back.

But there’s no show-stopping number, nor a dramatic scene that brings down the house. The show’s so-called big production number, “As Long As He Needs Me,” is winningly rendered by Victoria Strong as Nancy. But the piece is sung as if in a vacuum--we don’t feel her character’s love-smitten connection to the murderous Sikes, which would have set up the scene.

Fans of Dickens’ “Oliver Twist”--OK, the purists--have always groused about the sunniness of Lionel Bart’s book, music and lyrics--a show much too comforting, they argue, to catch the darkness in the famed author’s Victorian novel.

But had Dickens--a commercial, pragmatic writer if ever there was one--been writing for the West End musical stage, who knows? It’s possible he, too, might have lifted the shadows off the smoke-stained cityscape so well caught in the 1968 movie version that earned the Best Picture Oscar.

In any event, and despite Bill Shaw’s generally by-the-numbers production, Bart wrote a musical that is hard to dislike. It has everything--love, murder, poverty, betrayal, sentiment and hordes of children who aren’t stagy cute.

All of it is set in a besotted, raffish “Three Penny Opera” kind of underworld. The set design, courtesy of the San Bernardino Civic Light Opera’s scenic studios, had a door jamb and frame that couldn’t stop shaking at the slightest pressure.

Animating the grungy London streets are Richard Stuart’s pesky Artful Dodger (what names Dickens could invent!), Bart Williams’ obese, intimidating Mr. Bumble, Laura Ware as his hideous matron at the dank orphanage, and Dink O’Neal and Claudia Dunn as the undertakers Mr. and Mrs. Sowerberry.

The irony of this musical is that young Oliver is having such a good time with Fagin and his ragamuffins that you almost wish he could stay with these chummy, homeless bandits instead of returning to his loving, staid, aristocratic grandfather (Fred Derbyshire).

* “Oliver!” San Gabriel Civ ic Light Opera, 320 S. Mission Drive, San Gabriel, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, 8:15 p.m., Saturday and Sunday matinees, 2:15 p.m. Ends Oct. 25. $15-$30. (818) 308-2868. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.