THEATER REVIEW : Plucky ‘Oliver!’ Cast Considers Itself at Home : Artful acting complements the lively and lovely musical, the first joint production of the playhouse’s main stage and youth companies.

Two days after the recent firestorm here narrowly missed the Moulton Theatre, the cast of “Oliver!” returned to the facility for rehearsal. As Joe Lauderdale, the musical’s director, tells it, a boy in the Laguna Playhouse’s Youth Theater program came to him (Lauderdale also heads that program) and apologized because he had lost his chorus book in the fire. Along with his house.

Lauderdale replaced the book, and the boy rejoined the company in preparation for Thursday’s opening night performance.

As they say, the show must go on. And audiences should consider themselves darned lucky it did. “Oliver!,” the first co-production by members of Laguna Playhouse’s main stage and youth theater companies, features more than 40 amateur and professional adult actors along with youths age 10 to 16 in a cast that brought most of the audience to its feet, cheering, on opening night.

“Oliver!” is Lionel Bart’s musical adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel “Oliver Twist.” As Lauderdale points out in his program notes, when the musical premiered in London in 1960, Dickens purists decried the way it maximized song and dance sequences at the expense of the book’s darker elements and social commentary. They weren’t kidding; by and large, “Oliver!” is about as brooding as a 2-year-old.

Plot-wise, “Oliver!” is something like “Annie,” another musical in which a downtrodden youngster dares to buck the system and is rewarded with a lifetime supply of warm food, clean sheets and unconditional love. Unlike “Annie” and its ilk, however, “Oliver!” offers at least a few characters of considerable complexity as well as moments of real tension and pathos.

The title character, played by 13-year-old Gabriel Kalomas, is an orphan abandoned to the “loving” care of the city workhouse, where the boys are fed plenty of verbal abuse and niggardly portions of gruel. Oliver dares to want more, and in a spiral of luck that goes from bad to rotten, he ends up on the street and in the hands of Fagin, a questionable benefactor who commands a legion of young pickpockets. As a thief, Oliver is a dismal failure, but his luck takes a brief upswing when he is brought into the home of Mr. Brownlow, a well-off elderly gentleman with a secret heartache.

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Lauderdale has Kalomas playing the role on the waifish side, preferring to leave the devilishness to Oliver’s counterpart, the Artful Dodger (Jesse Swimm). Kalomas has a choirboy sweetness to him that he uses to good effect in tunes such as “Who Will Buy?”; any mother in the audience would take the lad in a flat second.

The character of Bill Sykes is probably the closest to being classic Dickens. Sykes is a fearsome man who has cut his way through London’s underbelly with a dagger and has no qualms about the mess he’s left behind.

Dink A. O’Neal chews up the stage as Sykes. Well over 6 feet tall, O’Neal has a voice that begins somewhere around his boot soles and goes down from there, a trait he uses chillingly well in his introductory song, “My Name.” A product of the streets, O’Neal’s Sykes keeps anger and violence on tap; there’s no question that it’s coming, it’s just a matter of when. And you don’t want to be in the way when it does.

Fagin, by contrast, is practically a pussycat. Although his vocation--plying homeless boys with gin and lodgings so they can fill his pockets with stolen goods--makes him no Scout leader, in the hands of actor Tim Dey he becomes one of the more likable characters. Dey makes it clear that not far under that tattered greasy coat is a heart at least partially brimming with paternal feelings. A nimble dancer, Dey never seems to strain for a note despite his athletic performance, and thankfully, except for a few Tevya-like lapses during “Reviewing the Situation,” he doesn’t rely on caricatures for laughs.

Nancy, the good-hearted wench who loves Sykes despite her better judgment, provides most of the womanly influence in this show. Kathi M. Gillmore is excellent, playing out Nancy’s evolution from a saucy petty thief to a tragic heroine without melodrama. Her performance of “As Long as He Needs Me” sung atop a slowly revolving set is a showstopper.

Gary May’s elaborate double-decker set is large and complex by playhouse standards and has more stairs than a Manhattan walk-up, but the cast uses it to best advantage, assisted by William F. Lett’s choreography, which is bright but not overly wrought.

Costume designer Dwight Richard Odle plays it straight with period-style clothing but throws in a few nice subtleties such as the disappearance of Widow Corney’s remarkable decolletage after she snags Mr. Bumble and the rosier shades of the Londoner’s street clothes when Oliver is taken in by Mr. Brownlow.

* “Oliver!,” Moulton Theatre, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Show times: Tuesday through Friday at 8 p.m. (except Nov. 25 and 30); Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m.; and Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m through Dec. 12. (No 7 p.m. performance on Dec. 12.) $10 to $16 for children, $16 to $25 for adults. (714) 494-8021. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes. Gabriel Kalomas Oliver

Eric J. Hindley: Mr. Bumble

Shannon McCleerey: Widow Corney

Nanci Fast: Mrs. Sowerberry

Tim Dey: Fagin, Mr. Sowerberry

Jesse Swimm: The Artful Dodger

Kathi M. Gillmore: Nancy

Sara Buskirk: Bet

George Pelling: Mr. Brownlow

Dink A. O’Neal: Bill Sykes

Presented by the Laguna Playhouse. Book, music and lyrics by Lionel Bart. Based on the novel “Oliver Twist” by Charles Dickens. Directed by Joe Lauderdale. Choreography: William F. Lett. Musical Direction: Diane King Venn. Set: Gary May. Lighting: Don Gruber. Costumes: Dwight Richard Odle. Sound: David Edwards.