‘Oliver!’ With a Twist : If a 28-year-old London director deconstructs the classic Lionel Bart musical, can he put it back together? Apparently so: It’s sold $11 million worth of tickets before opening.

“Half the people in Britain have seen this musical,” Cameron Mackintosh says with an audible sigh. “And it seems the other half have actually been in it.”

He is talking about “Oliver!,” Lionel Bart’s stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novel, “Oliver Twist,” which dealt with the poverty, crime and homeless children in early Victorian London. The musical made its debut in the West End in 1960, and was an instant hit, powered by memorable songs like “Consider Yourself,” “As Long as He Needs Me,” “Food, Glorious Food” and “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two.” Overnight, Bart became one of the biggest celebrities in Britain. It made a star of the hitherto obscure Ron Moody, who played the villainous Fagin.

A film version of “Oliver!” in 1968, also starring Moody, was a worldwide hit and won six Oscars. In Britain, especially, “Oliver!” is hugely familiar--a reliable, crowd-pleasing choice for amateur dramatic groups and (perhaps because it calls for a large number of young boys in the chorus) high school plays.

One might think that Mackintosh, the impresario who has staged “Cats,” “Les Miserables” and “Miss Saigon” in recent years, is taking a big chance in launching a revival of such a familiar work--especially in a lavish, 3.6 million pounds ($5.6 million) West End production. Jonathan Pryce, the actor who became a musical theater star with the role of the Engineer in “Miss Saigon” and is now the new Fagin, admits that expectations are high.

“Everyone I meet these days seems to have been involved in ‘Oliver!’ in some way,” he notes. “Only yesterday I was in a shop and a man introduced himself to me. He’d been a boy soprano and was on the soundtrack of the film. He was very proprietorial about it all, I must say.”

In fact, Mackintosh’s gamble has already paid off in strictly financial terms. Prior to its opening this Thursday at the London Palladium, a staggering 7 million pounds ($11 million) of tickets have been sold and bookings are currently being taken for next summer. This puts it beyond doubt that the new “Oliver!” will be the biggest musical to hit London’s West End since “Miss Saigon” (certainly bigger than Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard”). It appears that the British public, to echo Oliver Twist’s famous phrase, really do “want some more.” A transfer to American shores, while not being discussed yet, seems highly likely.

But will it be any good? Will it merely coast along for a year on the strength of the advance buzz, or will it be a long-running West End hit, like Mackintosh’s other hits? The critics have yet to deliver their verdicts, but the scale of the show’s success is ultimately up to one man: director Sam Mendes, 28.

And herein lies another possible pitfall for Mackintosh. Mendes is widely regarded as British theater’s leading Wunderkind, but his reputation rests on brilliant work far removed from the commercial, high-visibility pressures of the West End musical. He directed highly praised Royal Shakespeare Company productions of “Troilus and Cressida” (with Ralph Fiennes), “The Tempest” and “Richard III,” as well as Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” at the National Theatre.

Since 1992 Mendes has been artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, a 250-seat theater in Covent Garden. There he has directed a successful reworking of the musical “Cabaret,” with his girlfriend-actress Jane Horrocks (best known in America for the film “Life Is Sweet”) in the Sally Bowles role. Even more notably, he received raves for the London production of the difficult Stephen Sondheim musical “Assassins,” which stalled Off Broadway but which Mendes triumphantly restaged as a black farce.

“This is so much bigger,” he says of “Oliver!” “In rehearsals, I like to close the door behind me with two or three actors and get on with it. On this show, there are 25 people behind me--and the cast and 48 kids on stage. You feel like you’re in a fish tank sometimes. It’s as if this is a different job altogether--like you’ve sculpted in marble for 10 years and now you have to build a house.”

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Part of the intrigue surrounding Mendes being hired to direct such a well-loved, familiar musical as “Oliver!” is his modus operandi in rehearsals; he likes to deconstruct theatrical works, strip them to their essentials and rethink them as he rebuilds them.

“You have to take the show apart and question everything,” Mendes says. “That includes the tempo of the songs, the structure of the entire piece. You have to go back to a point where a song didn’t exist. We know this is a hit show, a show which delivers. So why is it good? How do you make it better? I love challenging these icons of theater, like ‘Cabaret’ and ‘Oliver!’ Part of the thrill of theater is reinvention.”

He has been as good as his word. This will be the first major production of “Oliver!” that has not employed the original revolving set designed by Sean Kenny, regarded in its time as startlingly ground-breaking. In 1960 Kenny hit on the notion (which now seems quite post-modern) of showing the audience the mechanics of scene-shifting and lighting changes; stagehands did their work in plain sight and doubled as members of the chorus.

Instead, Mendes and Mackintosh approached designer Anthony Ward (with whom Mendes had worked at the RSC) to rethink the set; Ward, who describes himself as a minimalist, has come up with a variety of London scenes, creating an illusion of space through shifting perspectives. This alone will make the new “Oliver!” a very different show from audiences’ expectations.

It was Mackintosh’s decision to kill off the old “Oliver!” and allow a new one to be reborn. His association with the show goes back to 1965, when he worked as an assistant stage manager with a touring company; he was one of the singing stagehands. A decade later, when he had become a producer, he bought most of the performing rights to “Oliver!” and revived it in 1977 and 1983.

He then “retired” “Oliver!” for a decade and allowed no major productions during that time: “After (1983) I decided that wonderful though the show was, I was never going to be able to put new life into it without getting rid of Sean’s set. That was a big decision, because it’s one of the most brilliant ever designed. But the problem is that the set directs the show, and there would never be a chance of getting a top director to do another production if he had to be shunted around by that set.”

Another crucial change has been wrought. The original “Oliver!” had no choreography, though the film featured dance sequences. Mendes brought in Matthew Bourne, who runs the British avant-garde dance troupe Adventures in Motion Pictures, to devise some “musical staging.” “It’s not choreography as such,” he says. “But because everyone knows the film, we’re having some dance, as long as it stems from realistic situations. Cameron said to integrate dance if it’s necessary, rather than have gratuitous dance numbers.”

Bourne is 34, and was a babe in arms when “Oliver!” made its debut in 1960. Ward was only 3; Mendes would not be born for another five years. “It’ll feel like a new show,” Bourne predicts. “That’s why Cameron picked a new set of younger people to rethink it. We don’t come with the baggage of the original show in our memories.”

The same would seem to apply to the cast; Pryce cheerfully admits he has never seen “Oliver!” on stage. Despite his success as the Engineer in “Miss Saigon,” he is hardly a safe choice as Fagin; he remains best-known as a dramatic actor, who has played “Hamlet” and was the lead in Terry Gilliam’s film “Brazil.”

“But the same is true of all of us,” Pryce says. “Of all the principals in the cast, none is from the musical theater. Apart from me there’s Sally Dexter and Miles Anderson (who play Nancy and Bill Sikes respectively) from the RSC. We’re all actors, primarily.”

Actors or children, anyhow. When “Oliver!” first opened in 1960, there were only 14 boys (from the workhouse or Fagin’s gang) on stage. This new production calls for 24 boys, and British child employment laws now dictate that two Olivers and two parallel gangs of 24 must be used on different nights. “When I last did the show in 1977, 70% of the kids were 13 to 15, and the other 30% were under 13,” says Mackintosh. “Now it’s the opposite--children have become much more precocious and aware.

“It’s made life harder. Sam’s been rehearsing with the children in the daytime and not calling the adults in the cast until the evening, when the kids go off to bed. It’s made for some complicated logistics and very long working days.” Not only that, the first two preview performances of “Oliver!” in mid-November had to be canceled because Fagin’s gangs of child pickpockets needed more rehearsal time.

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Given these problems, some trepidation on the part of the “Oliver!” team is understandable and evident; Mendes has declared the Palladium auditorium a no-go area to outsiders during rehearsals. Visitors meet the principals in dressing rooms to which they are escorted via a route ensuring the sets are never seen.

For all this caution, one figure connected with the production remains cheerfully optimistic--its creator, Lionel Bart. He has been retained on a consultancy basis by Mackintosh, has worked with Mendes on the script and has extended a couple of songs and lyrics. “It’s going to be all right,” says Bart perkily, his Cockney accent undimmed.

He is 64 now and has been in the wilderness for two decades. After “Oliver!” his muse largely deserted him; his show “Blitz!” failed to repeat his success, and his musical “Twang!” was an unmitigated disaster. Bart declared bankruptcy, lost his rights to “Oliver!” and is now a recovering alcoholic who has suffered diabetes and an internal hemorrhage.

“Sam’s vision is a bit darker and more real than my staging,” he says. “It’s hard for me to go in (to rehearsals) and not think of the original. But the one thing I don’t say is: ‘This is how we did it.’ I’ve tried to be supportive, not a judge. I’m involved, yet I have to stand back.”

“It’s been hard for Lionel,” says Mendes. “Remember, he hasn’t been in a rehearsal room for 20 years, and to a degree I think it’s freaked him out. The scale of this show is something he’s just not used to.”

Indeed, talking to Bart indicates the degree to which the culture of big international musicals has changed since his heyday. Mackintosh’s shows are run like a large-scale military operation, with each detail considered and even marginal aspects like publicity and merchandising thought out well ahead. Bart likes to say that the original “Oliver!” grew organically; in fact, it was born of chaos. He wrote four songs during rehearsals, and two more--”It’s a Fine Life” and “That’s Your Funeral”--in a 10-day pre-West End run at Wimbledon. Says Mendes: “He’ll say, ‘Oh, it was so organic,’ and I’ll think, ‘Well, that’s fine, Lionel. But this show can’t be just organic anymore.’ ”

Still, the overall mood of the company at this juncture is upbeat. As Pryce says, “ ‘Oliver!’ is extraordinarily good material. That’s why it’s survived all this time and why it’s so often performed.” Mendes gushes: “Song after song delivers, and the show has real old-fashioned virtues--conciseness, warmth, melodic simplicity, unpretentiousness. The music’s uplifting, the whole thing’s very life-affirming.”

One might also add that the underlying themes of “Oliver!”--poverty, homelessness, children on the streets--are far more relevant to the London of today than in 1960.

It would seem that what the new team needs to do, above all, is not to interfere with the essence of “Oliver!” “Correct,” says Mackintosh. “If people come out of this show saying it’s as good as the original, I’ll be happy and proud.”