‘Oliver Twist’s’ Fagin is so good it’s criminal

It takes a bit of doing to distill Dickens’ characteristically capacious plots into reasonably scaled stage plays, but protean theatrical veteran Neil Bartlett does the trick neatly in his ingenious adaptation of “Oliver Twist,” the latest offering from A Noise Within.

In a stirring staging, director Julia Rodriguez-Elliott keeps Bartlett’s rich stew on the boil. And while Dickens’ classic tale occasionally sticks to the bottom of the pot, it’s a flavorful concoction, a fitting offering in what has been, so far, a thoroughly remarkable season for this company.

Kurt Boetcher’s bare-bones set, which looks like the backstage of an old theater, is the perfect milieu for Bartlett’s highly theatrical romp. Pay particular attention to that towering, treacherous upstage ladder, a fitting visual metaphor for the inequities of the Victorian class system. (Ironically, little Oliver later scales that ladder not through innocence or industry, but by virtue of his upper-class birth -- an ascent that does not bode well for those lowborn gutter waifs he leaves behind.) Soojin Lee’s compellingly grubby costumes make us want to scratch in indelicate places, but it is Ken Booth’s lighting, which evokes begrimed street lamps and toxic fog, that is far and away the evening’s lowlight, creating an appropriately minatory atmosphere without obscuring the actors’ expressions.

Many in the cast, which is assembled upstage for much of the action, play multiple roles, and a considerable portion of the exposition is delivered by the full ensemble in a seamlessly precise narrative chorale, sometimes sung, sometimes spoken. Repetitive and dirge-like, David O’s original music gets a bit misplaced among the comical rhythms of the first act, but jibes perfectly with later, darker developments.

It’s a bit dicey to have Oliver, the 10-year-old orphan of mysterious antecedents, played by a post-pubescent actor, but Brian Dare is so convincingly sweet and childlike that we willingly suspend our disbelief. That same tack doesn’t work as well for Shaun Anthony as the Artful Dodger. Anthony, who also serves as narrator, is an able performer, but the fact that he is an adult undermines the full impact of the precociously criminal Dodger. The juxtaposition of the Dodger’s “little, sharp, ugly eyes” with a child’s face should be genuinely unsettling -- shock value largely lost here.

Jill Hill resonates as the doomed Nancy, the scrappy slum girl whose compassion for Oliver proves her undoing. However, in his attempts to humanize Bill Sykes, arguably Dickens’ most brutish character -- and that’s saying something -- Geoff Elliott goes a bit off track. Elliott seems intent on giving Sykes a “back story,” some insight into the particular pathology behind his degraded nature. But Sykes is a creature of appetites and instinct, more bestial than human. To display any emotion or regret behind his feral facade only weakens his reflexive cruelty.

Fortunately, there are no second thoughts behind Tom Fitzpatrick’s Fagin, which is delivered in unsullied Dickensian style. Monica Lisa Sabedra’s excellent makeup design gives Fagin the look of a cadaverous death’s head, prematurely rotted by his own venality and graft. Larger than life and evil as sin, Fitzpatrick doesn’t shy away from high melodrama, but embraces it. The result is truly spectacular, a Fagin that erases all other incarnations from memory.

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‘Oliver Twist’

Where: A Noise Within, 234 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale

When: : In repertory through Dec. 14. See www.anoisewithin.org for schedule.

Price: $40 to $44

Contact: (818) 240-0910, Ext 1

Running time: 2 hours