Oliver!

While super-producer Cameron Mackistosh still has breath in his body we’ll never be too far from the next revival of Lionel Bart’s all-singing Dickens adaptation Oliver!. Fifteen years after the last, Rupert Goold-directed London revival (which closed in 2011), it’s back in new guise in a Matthew Bourne directed production that premiered at Chichester Festival Theatre back in the summer to reviews that praised it as comfortingly nostalgic rather than doing anything particularly bold. But that’s what we want from ‘Oliver!’ really, isn’t it? All your favourite songs – Food Glorious Food, Consider Yourself, I’d Do Anything – are present and correct, with a cast that includes Simon Lipkin as Fagin, Shanay Holmes as Nancy, Aaron Sidwell as Bill Sikes, Billy Jenkins as the Artful Dodger and Philip Franks as Mr Brownlow.