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    ‘Oliver!’ Review: Tunes, Glorious Tunes, in a Grimly Cheerful Revival

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    The Encores! production, directed by Lear deBessonet, looks to deepen and darken a musical that resists the change. But it’s still delightful.Though the orphan boys at the workhouse are beaten regularly and fed only gruel, the sign looming above them reads “God Is Love.”That grim irony, underlining the practice of child labor in the supposedly advanced society of 19th-century London, is echoed in the spooky sounds you hear as the Encores! production of “Oliver!” begins: brass murk, woodwind rasps and stringy insectlike buzzing. Has Lionel Bart’s musical, based on the Dickens novel “Oliver Twist” and first seen on Broadway in 1963, been turned into “Sweeney Todd”?The version that opened a two-week run at City Center on Wednesday, directed by Lear deBessonet, is certainly grimmer than any “Oliver!” I’ve seen, which isn’t many; it’s seldom done professionally, for both casting and structural reasons. But the underlying high spirits of Bart’s adaptation, stuffed with tunes that are merry even when they’re sad, cannot long lie dormant. Soon the boys — a wonderfully uncloying ensemble — are bursting with mirth as they sing and dance to “Food, Glorious Food,” a number so irrepressible (with choreography by Lorin Latarro) that even a heavy concept can’t weigh it down.Which is not to say a serious approach is unwarranted. Recall that Dickens, who was himself sent to work in a boot polish factory when he was 12, refers to Oliver in the first sentence of the novel as an “item of mortality” — more a death-in-progress than a life. And Bart, at least in his lyrics, does not stint on bleakness; even the bouncy title song is violent, proposing various ugly fates for the boy who dares to ask for more food.“What will he do when he’s turned black and blue?” Mr. Bumble, the workhouse beadle, asks gleefully, in six-eight rhythm.Foreground from left: Lilli Cooper, Raúl Esparza and Pajak deliver terrific turns in Lear deBessonet’s production, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut deBessonet’s entertaining and beautifully sung production, featuring terrific turns by Lilli Cooper as the proud doxy Nancy and Raúl Esparza as the criminal den leader Fagin — as well as a touching one by Benjamin Pajak in the title role — is at this point still too muddy to be convincing as sociology, let alone drama.Partly that’s the result of the extremely short Encores! rehearsal period, which compresses what probably needs months into 12 days. The staging is sloppy in places, and the violent bits involving Bill Sikes (Tam Mutu), which in a rethinking like this should be shocking, aren’t. Spoiler alert: It appears that Nancy’s dress, not Nancy herself, is bludgeoned to death at the end.The other difficulty in reframing “Oliver!” for 2023 is built into the material. Like many musicals made from doorstop novels, it cherry-picks the plot so vigorously that what’s left can hardly support the songs. (The Encores! production uses a further abbreviated script.) Oliver’s transit from the workhouse to an undertaker’s establishment to Fagin’s hide-out, spread across eight chapters in the Dickens, takes what seems like a blink of an eye here. It becomes thin gruel indeed.And the songs themselves are problematic. Though there is barely a dud in the score, and many (like “I’d Do Anything” and “Oom-Pah-Pah”) are so hummable that the audience joins in almost subliminally, they are not so much dramatizations of the action as ditties vaguely suggested by it. “Consider Yourself,” the number in which Fagin’s pickpockets, led by the Artful Dodger (Julian Lerner), welcome Oliver to the gang, opens out illogically into a full-company number featuring buskers, laborers, flower girls and 20 extras — children from New York City schools — in a way that screams unreconstructed musical comedy.Julian Lerner, center left, as the Artful Dodger in a number with Pajak, other cast members and students.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou wouldn’t want to prevent that; there’s too much pleasure to be reaped. Bart was an untrained tune savant, a latter-day Irving Berlin; if the songs are so hummable it’s probably because his composition method was built on humming them to an amanuensis.For “Oliver!” that meant delightful numbers even where a modern musical would say none was needed. “I Shall Scream!,” served up with raucous good humor by Brad Oscar and Mary Testa as Mr. Bumble and Widow Corney, is utterly beside the point, as is “That’s Your Funeral,” a similarly bouncy number for Mr. Sowerberry and his wife (Thom Sesma and Rashidra Scott) even though they are funeral directors.However inapt as drama, and however much real estate they steal from the development of a richer plot, such songs serve an important function, like the witty prose of the novel. They make the darkness of the tale bearable, almost literally — bearing you through the story.Nor is it just the music that has that effect, though it’s always jaunty. (Except when, in songs like “Boy for Sale,” “Where Is Love?,” “Who Will Buy?” and “As Long as He Needs Me,” it’s show-stoppingly lovely.) The lyrics do similar uplifting work. Though deBessonet has referred to them as “harrowing,” that quality is often undermined by the intricate rhymes, many built on cockney pronunciations (uppity/cup o’ tea) that can’t help but produce a smile.That makes the project of darkening the show difficult. Though the busily atmospheric orchestrations by William David Brohn, created for a 1994 production at the London Palladium, expand the number of musicians to 21 from 12, I’m not sure that the originals, with more of a music-hall than a symphonic quality, didn’t match the material better. Likewise, the overlay of deBessonet’s vision sometimes obscures more than it reveals.But perhaps we do not need “Oliver!” to be a Gesamtkunstwerk. Dickens intended the tale, after all, as popular entertainment, serialized over the course of two years and highly indulgent of gaudy melodrama.Also, of course, in its presentation of Fagin, indulgent of antisemitism. Compulsively referred to as “the Jew” in the novel and often played with a prosthetic nose and a Yiddish accent in earlier productions, Fagin is an awful caricature even though Bart, born Lionel Begleiter, was Jewish.Esparza — sallow-eyed, greasy-haired and perpetually sniffly, but without prosthetics — dials that down almost to zero, though the music still bears traces of Fagin’s religion in the klezmerlike violin-and-clarinet accompaniment to the song “Reviewing the Situation” with which deBessonet thoughtfully ends this production.The song asks: “Can somebody change?” Fagin’s doubtful answer is “S’possible.”I too am doubtful about the possibility of change, at least for musicals like “Oliver!” (And keep in mind that in the Dickens, Fagin is eventually executed.) They can’t all be “Sweeney”; they don’t have the bones for it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth reinvesting in what made them meaningful in the first place, if dividends of delight keep coming. For that, I’d do anything.Oliver!Through May 14 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      ‘Oliver!’ Returns, With Darker Twists Intact

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      The emphasis Encores! puts on words and music rather than spectacle allows the cruel realities of Dickensian London to stand out amid the bouncy tunes.It was 10 a.m. on a recent morning in a rehearsal room at New York City Center, and nine boys scurried around the space, clutching parasols of red and white lace, tin cups and jaunty pocket squares.“OK, everyone!” said Lorin Latarro, the choreographer of the show, a new staging of “Oliver!,” the Lionel Bart musical opening at City Center on Wednesday for a two-week run as part of the Encores! series. “Today we’re going to work on ‘I’d Do Anything.’”The boys gathered around Raúl Esparza, who is playing Fagin, the lovable London crime lord, in a battered brown hat with a buckle, tan overcoat and black fingerless gloves.“Would you risk the ‘drop’?” he sang, his eyes bugging as he grabbed his scarf and mimed a noose tightening around his neck. (Translation: Are you willing to go out and commit robbery and possibly face the gallows if you’re caught?) All nine pickpockets in training nodded enthusiastically.“Oliver!,” based on the Charles Dickens novel “Oliver Twist,” is the story of an orphan’s search for belonging in that band of young pickpockets in 1830s London. It mixes fun, candy-coated musical theater crowd-pleasers like “Food, Glorious Food” and “Consider Yourself” with darker Dickensian themes including poverty and domestic violence.“The show has these really harrowing lyrics even in songs that are upbeat,” said the production’s director, Lear deBessonet. “And I think that in some productions, you may just be bobbing along with the rhythm of the song, and you might not really hear those words.”But that’s generally not the case in the concert-like stagings that Encores! is known for. Although there is an orchestra onstage, props and sets are minimal.“Because you strip away some of those other production elements, it really puts a new focus on the lyric,” deBessonet said. “It’s meaty work for me as a director to figure out how to tell the story with so few elements.”When deBessonet, now in her third year as the artistic director of Encores!, was setting the season lineup in late 2021, just before the Omicron surge of Covid-19, she was struck by the parallels between the uncertain present and the perilous world of Dickens’s day.“It’s interesting that ‘Oliver!’ is generally thought of as a family musical,” she said in a recent conversation in her office at City Center. “It certainly has these very winsome tunes, and the cast of children is delightful beyond measure, but there are dark edges of the story that we’re very much leaning into and exploring in this production.”Lilli Cooper, left, as Nancy, and Angelica Beliard, right, dancing with Benjamin Pajak, who plays Oliver in the musical.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesMANY OF THE SONGS FROM ‘OLIVER!’ have become well known, thanks to the popular 1968 film adaptation, which starred Ron Moody as Fagin. This crowd-pleasing musical is a staple of school stages across Britain, where it debuted in London’s West End in 1960, and the United States, where it opened on Broadway in 1963 and won three Tony Awards, including one for the score. But “Oliver!,” like many of the shows staged by Encores!, whose mission is to offer revivals of seldom-seen work, is rarely produced in full.It hasn’t been professionally staged in its entirety on a New York City stage in nearly 40 years, since the short-lived 1984 Broadway revival that starred Patti LuPone as Nancy. In fact, neither deBessonet, nor any of the five main cast members except for Benjamin Pajak (“The Music Man”), who plays Oliver, had ever seen a live performance of the show.David Jones as the Artful Dodger (in top hat) and Georgia Brown, beside him, in a number from the musical “Oliver!” on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964.CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesIn addition to Esparza (“Company”), the show also stars Lilli Cooper as Nancy, the romantic partner of the brutal Bill Sikes (Tam Mutu, recently of “Moulin Rouge! The Musical”), and Julian Lerner, who plays the Artful Dodger, the leader of the gang that takes Oliver in.Underscoring the musical’s darker bits, deBessonet said, like the fear and loneliness the orphaned Oliver experiences, was a matter of subtraction rather than addition. Without elaborate sets or showstopping production numbers there are fewer elements competing to divert the audience’s attention from the words of the actors.But neither did the production need to amp up the grim with foreboding lighting or a fog machine, she said — the darkness is already inherent in Dickens’s text, and in Bart’s book, score and lyrics.“We’re trying to have those words be heard with the belief that the complexity is in the lyric itself,” she said.One example, she said, is the titular tune “Oliver!,” a song familiar to many, even those who haven’t seen the show, for its high-spirited chorus.“It’s this really bouncy song,” deBessonet said, “but the actual lyrics are:There’s a dark, thin, winding stairwayWithout any banisterWhich we’ll throw him down and feed him on cockroachesServed in a canister.The show does preserve many of the musical’s more lighthearted elements. Every song from the original Broadway production remains, including bouncy numbers like “I’d Do Anything” and “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two.” The dreamlike sequence “Food, Glorious Food,” with its visions of sausages and mustards, jelly and custard. And 20 additional performers, all New York City public school students, will join the company onstage for “Consider Yourself,” the boys’ full-voiced embrace of Oliver into their ranks — the first true family he has known.“The show is incredibly challenging — the domestic violence, the treatment of children at that time in general is truly harrowing,” deBessonet said. “And yet there’s this buoyant joy about these numbers.”And the emotional core is still the camaraderie that springs up between the striving, working-class characters.“The whole narrative question of the show is ‘Where is the love?’ and Fagin is one answer,” deBessonet said. “But it’s complicated.”Even though the Fagin of the Bart musical is more of a lovable curmudgeon than the child-exploiting criminal in the Dickens novel, deBessonet and Esparza said that they wanted the audience to remain cognizant of the less-savory context of his mentorship.“I fully believe Fagin loves those children, and he is exploiting them,” deBessonet said. “He’s sending them out to rob for him, to keep him alive, and he knows that every time he sends them out, there’s a possibility that they could get caught or killed.”Less complex is Bill Sikes, who is objectively the show’s most loathsome character.“Bill Sikes is a sociopath, and there is no end to his cruelty,” deBessonet said of Nancy’s abusive boyfriend. “The show ends with him murdering her brutally in front of us and in front of a kid.”A model of the stage set of “Oliver!”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBut Mutu knew he didn’t want to play a one-note villain. Instead he searched for the humanity within the character, to add nuances to his portrayal without offering redemption.“People aren’t black and white,” he said. “There are levels to each of us. Yes, I am playing a sociopath who has violent tendencies —”“— but he has redeeming qualities,” Esparza interjected. “Which are?”They both laughed.“The love between Nancy and Bill is genuine,” Mutu said, referring to their codependency as fascinating. “I’m trying to find the sense of the complexity of our relationship, which I think gets brushed under the carpet.”Normally, deBessonet said, she would have no interest in doing a production that includes violence toward a woman — “I’ve already seen enough of that for a lifetime” — but she was impressed by Nancy’s bravery, how she risked everything to save the life of Oliver.And Cooper and deBessonet said they wanted to make sure Nancy’s murder was not the final word on her story. “Her life is about her heroism and choosing to lay down her life to save this child who not too long ago was a stranger to her,” deBessonet said.Though Nancy allows others to see her as a passive player in her own life, Cooper wanted her performance to underscore the power Nancy wields in moments like the “Oom-Pah-Pah” number, in which her lively and somewhat risqué dance is actually a means of distracting Bill Sikes and Fagin so she can help Oliver escape.“She has this innate maternal nature to her,” Cooper said, “especially with all the boys in Fagin’s den and wanting to protect them. Even with Bill, the man that she loves, she feels needed by those who are wounded and fragile and need help.”“She herself was a child thief, and she’s managed to grab hold of life with this force,” deBessonet said. “In the face of all that difficulty, she’s been able to say, ‘I’m still going to love life.”BACK IN THE REHEARSAL ROOM, the boys continued their run-through of “I’d Do Anything.” Two stood on either side at the front, wielding red parasols, while two with white ones flanked them from behind. As the boys spun the parasols to imitate wheels, Nancy and the Artful Dodger walked to center.“Would you climb a hill?” she sang, as the human “carriage” began to roll.“Anything!” he responded.“Wear a daffodil?”He nodded. “Anything!”“Leave me all your will?”He nodded more vigorously. “Anything!”“Even fight my Bill?” she asked pointedly.He recoiled slightly.“Stop!” Latarro called. She walked over to Lerner. “Bill Sikes is really tall and really scary — he’s like a boxer,” she said. “So you all jump back like ‘No way!’”They tried again.This time when Nancy asked, all nine pickpockets sprung back as though they had just realized they were standing on the third rail. Their eyes hardened.“Anything!” More

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      After 40 Years of Fa-La-Laing, a New York Caroler Hands In His Bells

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      A onetime Macy’s elf, Tom Andolora founded a troupe that sang Christmas carols in Victorian dress. Now he is packing it in, worried about the survival of New York caroling.He has been heckled, slapped by a drunk Wall Street banker and ignored altogether. He has performed in the cake section of a Bronx supermarket, serenaded commuters on frigid Manhattan subway platforms and sung from inside a claustrophobic display window at Bloomingdale’s.Being a Christmas caroler in New York City is not for the fainthearted. Just ask Tom Andolora, a onetime elf at Macy’s Santaland, who has spent the past four decades leading the Dickens’ Victorian Carolers, which he founded in 1982.Now, after a long career in which the Carolers have tried to spread a little comfort and joy to sick children at Harlem Hospital, provided the soundtrack for wedding proposals at Rockefeller Center and serenaded several first ladies at the White House, Andolora, 65, is caroling for the last time this Christmas, before turning in his bells and retiring.“Caroling is a dying art form and I don’t know if New York caroling will even be around in a decade,” he said, wistfully flipping through old photos of himself, in his top hat and Victorian dress.“People don’t want religion or tradition anymore,” he worried. “I’ve given up my Christmases for 40 years. I’m done.”The lingering effects of the coronavirus pandemic; holiday playlists that are now heavier on Mariah Carey than the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge; competition from younger upstarts who can rap “Jingle Bells”; and the closure of storied New York department stores like Lord & Taylor and Gimbels were all making traditional Victorian-style caroling increasingly untenable.Andolora said the caroling business had never fully recovered from the coronavirus. “We are still getting cancellations,” he said. “People are getting Covid or are afraid of getting it.”Bretana Turkon, Andolora, Rebecca Reres and Justin Tepper in 19th-century garb.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesCarols and caroling dates back at least to the Middle Ages in England, when people would go “a-wassailing” — singing Christmas songs in the streets in return for an alcoholic drink known as wassail, traditionally made with warmed ale, wine or cider, blended with spices and honey.In New York, the caroling tradition has existed for decades, with dozens of groups who take to the streets in all five boroughs, bringing a little Christmas cheer to grumpy department store shoppers, neighborhood churches and soulless corporate parties, sometimes for as much as $1,500 an appearance.Andolora began his Christmastime career as an elf.The year was 1981 and Andolora, the grandson of Italian immigrants, had recently arrived in Manhattan from Jamestown, N.Y., eager to make it big in show business like another Jamestown native, Lucille Ball. To begin with, however, he had to pay the rent, and was soon wearing a jaunty green hat, a green velvet tunic and red knee-high boots at Macy’s Santaland.He quickly worked his way up from “Tree Elf” to “Cashier Elf” before graduating to “Photo Elf” — positioning sometimes screaming children for their photos with Santa. He taught acting at Brooklyn College for a time, and also adapted and directed a gothic play about the secret lives of the dead.But inspired after hearing caroling groups he found wanting, Andolora, a powerful baritone, decided he could do better. And so the Dickens’ Victorian Carolers were born, a quartet clad in 19th-century garb — black top hats, lace collars, capes, hoop skirts and white gloves — which has drawn its ranks from cruise ships and Broadway productions like “Show Boat.”It turns out there is a crowded field of Dickensian carolers, apparently inspired by “A Christmas Carol,” and it has sometimes been difficult for the Dickens’ Victorian Carolers to stand out. There are the Dickens Carolers of Seattle, the Dickens Carolers of Kansas and the Original Dickens Carolers of Denver.“I added the word ‘Victorian’ to our name to try and be different,” Andolora explained.Andolora paid his dues (and the rent) as an elf at Macy’s Santaland.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesLooking back on his caroling days, Andolora said there had been mirth but also some Grinch-worthy moments, including a shopper who jeered, “That was terrible!” On more than one occasion, a member of the quartet has belted out “Twelve Days of Christmas” with stentorian gusto when the group was supposed to be singing a soulful version of “Silent Night.”Some years ago, at a private Christmas party in a Park Avenue penthouse, Andolora accidentally shoved a porcelain Buddha with his foot during a spirited rendition of “Deck the Halls.” He dislodged the statue’s arm, which fell with a thump to the floor.“It was mortifying,” he said, adding that the host, a wealthy impresario, forgave him.There have also been high points, like when a New York State Police officer proposing to his fiancée hired the group to gather nearby and sing “Congratulations!” as he got down on one knee.“He still sends me a Christmas card every year,” he said.The Carolers have also performed at the White House during four administrations. Andolora recalled that Nancy Reagan’s party was impeccably run, that the Clintons never showed up to take their photo, and that President Barack Obama teased the group about its oversize hoop skirts.Whatever the challenges of caroling in the Big City, Andolora said he had no regrets.“I have loved caroling since I was a kid,” he said. “It can bring people to tears.” More

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      in Theater

      A New ‘Christmas Carol’ for Broadway

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      Jefferson Mays will bring his adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic to the Nederlander Theater starting in November.A virtuosic one-man production of “A Christmas Carol,” in which a single actor plays more than 50 roles, including a potato, will be staged on Broadway during the coming holiday season.The actor is Jefferson Mays, a Tony Award winner with a lifelong passion for the Charles Dickens story (like many) who has been honing this production for years. In 2018, he first performed it at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles; in 2020, when the pandemic precluded in-person performances, he made a filmed version shot at the United Palace in Upper Manhattan.Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, called Mays’s performance in the film “astonishing” and said the adaptation was “an opportunity to make what was already a classic story feel new, while also making it feel as if it should matter forever.”The Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews on Nov. 8 and to open on Nov. 21 at the Nederlander Theater; the shelf-life of “Christmas Carol” productions tends to be short, and this one is slated to close on Jan. 1.Mays is a gifted shape-shifter — in 2004 he won a Tony Award for playing 35 characters in the solo show “I Am My Own Wife,” and in 2014 he was nominated for another Tony Award for playing eight roles, in the musical comedy “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.” (He was nominated again in 2017, for playing a Norwegian diplomat in a political drama, “Oslo.”)Mays is now on Broadway playing Mayor Shinn in a lavish revival of “The Music Man”; he will leave that production some time this fall to prepare for “A Christmas Carol.”The Dickens novella, with memorable characters including Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim and four ghosts (don’t forget Jacob Marley!), is a widely staged, and frequently adapted, redemption story; the last version on Broadway was in 2019.The new version was adapted by Mays and his wife, the actor Susan Lyons, along with Michael Arden, who is directing the production. The idea was conceived by Arden and Dane Laffrey, who is the production’s scenic and costume designer; the producers are Hunter Arnold and Kayla Greenspan. More

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      ‘A Sherlock Carol’ Review: Crime-Solving on Christmas Eve

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      Mark Shanahan remixes Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens into a clever, crowd-pleasing holiday comedy that happens also to be a murder mystery.It’s been three years since the grim tussle on the cliff above Reichenbach Falls, where the criminal mastermind Professor Moriarty plunged to his death.But for Sherlock Holmes, the demise of his nemesis has proved unmooring. In London, lawlessness continues apace, yet the great detective has given up the fight. Adrift in ennui, he no longer bothers to ensnare the city’s evildoers. His faithful Dr. Watson, eager to get the band back together, can’t even entice Holmes to come to his house for Christmas.“There is no greater fool than one who shouts ‘Happy Christmas!’ in a city throughout which the foulest of mankind lurks ’round every corner,” Holmes growls. “I’ll thank you to leave me alone, Watson.”Bit of a Grinch, isn’t he. Bit of a Scrooge, even. In “A Sherlock Carol,” Mark Shanahan’s arch charmer of a holiday mash-up, Holmes — not Dickens’s Scrooge — is the one who is “solitary as an oyster.”At New World Stages, Shanahan directs a cast of six, wonderfully led by the Broadway veterans Drew McVety as Holmes and Thom Sesma as Scrooge. Remixing Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens, this is a clever, crowd-pleasing holiday comedy that happens also to be a murder mystery.It isn’t aiming for sumptuous elegance, like Matthew Warchus’s large-cast, high-design production of Jack Thorne’s “A Christmas Carol,” seen two seasons ago on Broadway. This is a simpler, streamlined affair looking for — and, crucially, finding — silly, festive fun.On Christmas Eve 1894, the grumpish Holmes is haunted by a spirit: Moriarty, whose presence he feels stalking him everywhere.And the beatific, reformed Scrooge? Found dead that very day by a doctor who believes there was foul play. A fan of Watson’s stories, the doctor entreats Holmes to investigate — and is thrilled when the uncannily observant detective, while refusing his appeal, says he’s known everything about him since the moment he walked in.McVety on the case.Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMadePartisans of “A Christmas Carol” get a sweet thrill as well when Holmes, too arrogant to resist, gives a quick rundown of his intel on this stranger: He was poor in early childhood, illness shadowed his first years of life, the dead man was his benefactor. In an instant, we recognize the doctor — Tiny Tim, all grown up and doing well.After he tells Holmes that a famous diamond had been on its way to Scrooge, who recently received a death threat, the detective relents and takes the case.“The game is afoot,” he says, suddenly saucy, tossing one end of his scarf around a shoulder.And off we go into a sprightly escape of a play with a fine, much-doubling ensemble and a design team trailing reams of Broadway credits: Anna Louizos, set; Linda Cho, costumes; Rui Rita, lighting; John Gromada, music and sound; Charles G. LaPointe, hair and wigs. This production is in very good hands, and so are we.There is a curious shortage lately of plays to make us laugh, let alone to tickle both children and adults. For admirers of Doyle and Dickens, here’s one.A Sherlock CarolThrough Jan. 2 at New World Stages, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, asherlockcarol.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      in Television

      For Eddie Izzard, a ‘99’ Ice Cream and a Waterloo Sunset Are Wondrous Things

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      The star of “Six Minutes to Midnight,” opening Friday, tells why Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations, “Great Expectations,” David Bowie and London landmarks hold meaning for her.Eddie Izzard, the British comedian-actor-writer-activist-endurance runner, tends to push herself to the limit. And then some.“I do find — because I had my sort of 10 wilderness years before things took off — that I’ve tried very hard to stay four steps ahead of where I need to be,” Izzard, who is transgender, said in a video interview from London.She performs stand-up in English, French, German and Spanish. She channels 21 characters in a one-person show of Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations.” She runs multiple marathons for charity — clocking 32 in 31 days in January, each followed by a comedy routine, for her Make Humanity Great Again campaign, which supports global unity and tolerance.And still, Izzard found time to co-write, executive produce and star in “Six Minutes to Midnight,” set in 1939, about a teacher at a finishing school in the south of England whose students include the daughters of high-ranking Nazis. The film, out Friday, based on a true story she learned about from a museum curator in Bexhill-on-Sea, where her family is from, was a 10-year process: five to develop the characters and five to get her acting to a level where she could play a lead, alongside stars like Judi Dench.Catch her while you can: Izzard hopes to go into politics in the near future as a member of Parliament for the Labour party, during which she’ll take a hiatus from performing.With her career in high gear, the timing may not be perfect, but she’s not worried. “There’s the critical momentum you need when you’re going in,” she said, “but that will stick around for when you come out.”Izzard channeled her trademark whimsy into her list of 10 cultural essentials — from the fantasy world of the Narnia books to the simple delights of an ice cream cone — which she wrote herself. KATHRYN SHATTUCK1. Edward Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations My mum used to love to listen to classical music. My mum and dad were married in ‘Adan (Aden) in Yemen and Dad talked of her liking to go up onto the roof of a local hotel and play classical music from a gramophone record as the sun set. I think that, amongst others records, she would have played Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations, as it was one of the classical albums that was often played in the house. My mum died when I was only 6 years old, but I do remember hearing different albums played at home in the years she was alive, and this one stuck with me from an early age. The fact that he was called Edward, and so was I, didn’t hurt.2. “30 Rock” “30 Rock” is just gold dust. If you have a brain and a sense of humor, just buy the first episode. If it grabs you then just do what I did and download the whole box set. The height of great comedy is to be as intelligent as it is bonkers, and this is it. It’s the kind of sitcom that probably only could exist in a post-“Seinfeld” America, and it probably had to fight just as hard as “Seinfeld” did for its own existence over its first few seasons.3. “David Bowie: Finding Fame” The key thing in this documentary to take home to your brain is that it shows the 10 wilderness years before Bowie took off with Ziggy Stardust in 1972. One needs to know that he was in his first band in 1962, when the Beatles were just taking off. So the stamina that 10 years adrift taught him, and also the few times when it looked like things were taking off but then didn’t, must have informed the rest of his career. I didn’t realize until I watched this that he was at times, in the early days, way off course but he kept regrouping and coming back.4. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” by C.S. Lewis It is a great mystical adventure story to feed the imagination of kids. You have to understand that I’m dyslexic and so read very few books, but I read all of the seven Narnia ones when I was young. I later found out that Lewis was lacing in religion to the series, and this made every feel a little hoodwinked about the whole thing. But later, I realized you could just ignore the symbolism if you wanted to.5. “The Great Escape” A classic war film and one I’ve watched many times. The fact it is based in truth, when a lot of war films in those days were not, makes it even better. I like the film so much, I’ve even watched it in German. As I do my stand-up in German, I was playing Berlin, and I bought the DVD of the film there. If you switch on the German audio track and just have English subtitles, it is a different film. Suddenly they’re all talking German, and so it just becomes a battle between an extreme right regime and people fighting for a return to humanity.6. “Waterloo Sunset” Written by Ray Davies of the Kinks and performed by them. It’s a song that I’ve always thought was accidentally perfect for me as I knew exactly where to see a Waterloo sunset. Waterloo Bridge is my favorite London bridge (we have many). When I was a street performer at Covent Garden, I used to walk across the bridge to perform in front of the Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. And at some point soon after Covid, I will perform inside the Festival Hall. And then I’ll watch another sunset and I will play “Waterloo Sunset” again.7. “Pogles’ Wood” If you search for “Pogles’ Wood: Honey Bees” on YouTube, you can see an episode of this early animated TV series that I was mesmerized by when I was about 5 years old. Normally if you watch back at TV shows that you found entertaining at that age, you will find them tired and old-fashioned in modern times. But “Pogles’ Wood” still holds up with its mixture of animated characters, weirdly beguiling music and short pieces of live-action documentary that showed and taught you things from the real world.8. The “99” Ice Cream What did people do before ice cream? Nobody knows. But the “99” is a staple of the British ice cream world. It is just a basic wafer cone with soft white vanilla ice cream swirled on top of it, but the crowning difference that makes it a thing of genius is a chocolate Flake stuck diagonally (always diagonally) into the side of the vanilla ice cream.Once you buy your “99,” experienced users will have their own eating ritual to perform. Mine is always to push the chocolate Flake with one finger so that you push it down into the center of the cone. Then you close the hole in the ice cream over with your tongue and carry on eating the cone as if it never had a chocolate Flake. Then, when you are down to the final handle part of the cone, you have a heady mixture of wafer, vanilla ice cream and flaky chocolate to feast upon.9. “Great Expectations” Charles Dickens was born on Feb. 7, 1812, and slightly bizarrely, I was born on Feb. 7, 1962, 150 years later. Having never read a great work of literature, I thought I should start with a work of Dickens due to the weird link. I chose “Great Expectations” to firstly read and record it to become an audiobook (which I have now done), and then I thought I should turn it into a solo show. So I commissioned my older brother, Mark, to adapt it down from over 20 hours of book into a 90-minute solo performance.Apart from it being one of Dickens’ more mature books and a great story of Pip, Magwitch, Miss Havisham and Estella, “Great X” is also interesting for me as it starts off down to the South East of London, along the river Thames towards the mouth of the river. This is the Chatham, Kent area of England and was where Dickens grew up, and the book starts here in about the 1820s, which is when he was there as a child. So you hear about “the marshes” direct from his childhood, a place that was barren in the winter and glorious in the summer.10. The Parks of London I do find them a joy. Are they culture? I think so, for they can inspire. Two of our biggest are slap bang in the center of London. They are Hyde Park and Kensington Park. They are essentially one large park, but they have West Carriage Drive running between that separates them. The ancient Serpentine River runs through them, which was long ago turned into a boating lake. Speakers’ Corner, where anyone can pull up and hold forth on any subject, is in the northeast corner of Hyde Park — which is right by the beginning of the old Roman road of Watling Street. I encourage anyone to take a walk from the bottom corner of one park to the top corner of the other park on a warm and sunny day, and it will feel like a walk in the countryside. More

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      ‘Christmas Carol’ Review: Brooding Scrooge Gets Ghosted

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Pick‘Christmas Carol’ Review: Brooding Scrooge Gets GhostedAn elaborate production streamed live from London makes a miser out of Andrew Lincoln and the rest of us rich with holiday cheer.Andrew Lincoln makes for a particularly charismatic, if obstinate, Scrooge in the Old Vic production of “A Christmas Carol.”Credit…Manuel HarlanPublished More

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      Finding More Than Humbug in Scrooge and Company

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookFinding More Than Humbug in Scrooge and CompanyThis year a critic (and fan) of “A Christmas Carol” finds it especially resonant as a “timely study of what it truly means to be a decent person in a community.”CreditCredit…Manual CinemaPublished More