Comment on This Week I’ll Mostly be Listening to [Christmas Special]… Musicals! by eamonncork

What are you doing on Oliver Sos? I’m going to Dublin to see it in the New Year and am looking forward very much to that.
Bart is a fascinating character, in many ways he seems to embody the extraordinary highs and lows which were such a part of the musical theatre and made so many of the big Broadway shows huge gambles for everyone involved.
To come from that Joan Littlewood Stratford East world which Oliver was written for and become the toast of Broadway must have been disorientating enough. But then to lose all your money because you’d backed a show of your own Twang which was a complete disaster, signing over the rights to Oliver to the aforementioned Max Bygraves just to make the fiasco complete. And then to get one shot at redemption on Broadway with a musical, La Strada, which closed after just one performance. His life was itself like some Road To Ruin melodrama and there was drink and drugs and years in the closet as well.
But he really was a genius and I think Oliver stands up very well as does Fings as a musical equivalent of a Patrick Hamilton or Gerard Kersh novel with the title song’s lines like, “there used ter be class, buyin’a bit of vice, and that’s when a brass couldn’t go down under Union price,” and “Fahsands of pounds passing across the beize, there used to be tools, flashin’ around, oh for the bad old days.” I always reckon Kander and Ebb took a bit from that song for at least a couple of the numbers in Chicago.
Anyway, glad you liked the post. This is my favourite Lionel Bart song.

Unless it’s this one.