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“Can a Fellow Be a Villain All His Life?”: Oliver! , Fagin, and Performing Jewishness

2011; Routledge; Volume: 33; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08905495.2011.598673

1477-2663

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The musical has also had an impact on other adaptations of Oliver Twist. Most obvious is the Disney animated Oliver and Company (1988), in which Oliver is a kitten who gets mixed up with a gang of thieving dogs; although billed as inspired by Oliver Twist, it owes several debts to the intermediary text of Bart's Oliver! Not least is Dom DeLuise's portrayal of Fagin as victimized by Sikes. Even the film's title, Oliver & Company, is an homage to Bart's play; in the score of Oliver!, several musical numbers are designated in the play's score as to be performed by “Oliver and Company.” It also seems significant that Disney chose this story to make as a musical, their first foray back into the animated musical format after a hiatus of nearly a decade, ushering in the renaissance of high quality animated Disney movie musicals such as Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, begun by the composer/lyricist team of Ashman and Menken, who also worked on Oliver & Company. Later Menken would go on to compose the music for the annual Madison Square Garden A Christmas Carol. For more on Oliver and Company, see Marc Napolitano, “Disneyfying Dickens” 82–88. Rowan Atkinson alludes to this, stating that he tried to avoid that in his own portrayal of Fagin (Atkinson). It was preceded by Stop the World, I Want to Get Off (London 1962, New York 1962), also a success (on a much smaller scale) brought over by David Merrick (Morrden 163). The cast of British child actor-singers performing at one time or another in that first London run launched several important careers, including Davy Jones (The Monkees), Phil Collins (Genesis), and in the original cast Tony Robinson, later Baldrick on the Blackadder series. Yet Oliver!'s success with both British and American theater-goers was defined by its achieving success in an American medium. According to Dianne Brooks, the film Oliver! (1968), directed by Carroll Reed, was financed entirely by Columbia Pictures (116) and was more popular with American audiences than with British (114). It won five Academy Awards, including the Oscar for best picture in 1968 (Muir 49). These do not include an expensive Broadway flop starring Patti Lupone in 1984. Although there have been many successful stage musical adaptations from Dickens's fiction, such as Alan Menken's annual musical A Christmas Carol, first performed at Madison Square Garden in 1995, the only other Dickens musical to succeed in a huge way on Broadway since Oliver! was the somewhat gimmicky Drood, in which the audience would vote on the solution to the mystery and the cast would perform one of six concluding numbers accordingly. Among the less successful attempts to bring Dickens to the Broadway musical stage are Copperfield (1981) and A Tale of Two Cities (2008). For a detailed analysis of Sweeney Todd's debt to Oliver! and Oliver Twist, see Weltman 55–76. An exception is the recent dissertation by Marc Napolitano, “‘Reviewing the Situation’: Oliver! and the Musical Afterlife of Dickens's Novels.” By David Roper, this biography came out several years before Bart's death. Juliet John and others argue this about melodrama. Neither did Frank Loesser grow up poor; but Jewish-American musical composers and lyricists Irving Berlin, Kurt Weil, and George and Ira Gershwin came from more straightened circumstances. Another difference is German versus Eastern European (particularly Russian or Lithuanian) parentage (Gottleib 158). Their birth names were Lillian Klot, Ronald Moodnik, and Lionel Begleiter. On the other hand, he may have been a bit intimidated by the prospect. Bart remarked when he appeared on stage for the twenty-third curtain call on opening night, “May the good Dickens forgive us” (Ellis). Bart is not the only Jewish pop culture author to want to recuperate Fagin; see, for example, Will Eisener's graphic novel Fagin the Jew (2003). There was also the Jewish Chronicle's question in 1854: “Why Jews alone should be excluded from ‘the sympathizing heart’ of this great author and powerful friend of the oppressed” (qtd. in Baumgarten 50). See below for scholarship on “queer” Fagin. David Lean's film also eschews the label of Jew for Fagin, yet Alec Guiness's performance loads the character with many stereotypical features fully recognizable to the 1948 audience as well as to more recent ones, including the notorious nose, a strong Yiddish accent, and a nasal twang. Less recognizable now but held over from the Victorians is the lisp. I count just over 320 mentions of “Jew” in the Gadshill edition, edited by Andrew Lang and digitized by the University of Virginia. Fagin never performs his Jewishness in the novel. Unlike Barney, he has no nasal twang; and he certainly observes no Jewish rituals or religious commandments, which is what makes Timothy Spall's performance in the recent BBC adaptation so bizarre: his Fagin wears a yarmulke, says Hebrew blessings over his food, and won't eat the sausages he cooks for the children. Nevertheless, even if every identification of him as “Jew” were removed from the text (and certainly Dickens removed many of them), Victorian readers would still recognize the common stereotype. Klezmer is a genre of traditional Jewish dance music, originating in Eastern Europe where itinerant bands of musicians would play for weddings that would last for days. Klezmer forms the basis of many popular Yiddish songs, incorporating influences from both the Russian and Ottoman empires. Often playing by ear, instrumentalists improvise, performing musical tricks that sound (for example) like the human voice laughing or sobbing. My thanks go to Rowan Atkinson for granting this interview and to Christina Welsch and to Doris Raab for their excellent research assistance on this project. Atkinson explained, “I'm not Jewish myself, so my perspective is uninformed. And, in the end, I'm relying probably on cliché to supply the basic grammar of the character and the way he talks, which is probably not very good. I should have read more about it . . . read more about the nature of Jews in Victorian London” (Atkinson). Nancy's first appearance in the role of angel in the house in the novel is more parody than anything else: winking at Fagin and Sikes, Nancy gleefully disguises herself as a mock proto-Esther Summerson—with household key, clean apron, and respectable cap to hide her curl papers—when she goes to discover Oliver's whereabouts (93). In the recent BBC production of Oliver Twist (2007), the actress playing Nancy, Sophie Okonedo, is black. This casting evokes the hint of Tragic Mulatta despite the greater overall effect of race-blind casting, since there is no suggestion in the dramatization's plot suggesting that the character is of African or Afro-Caribbean descent. Interestingly, this casting recalls the first choice of the film Oliver!'s director Carol Reed, who wanted Shirley Bassey for the part of Nancy, but “Columbia vetoed her because it was felt that a black Nancy would alienate filmgoers in the American South” (Moss 251). In choosing to return to her batterer rather than to save herself by accepting Rose Maylie's offer of help, Nancy follows the path that leads to her death. Archibald argues that this demonstrates neither her altruism, nor her sexual attraction to Sikes, nor her voluntary sacrifice to save Oliver (all of which are true of her as well—at least in other moments); instead, she explains, Nancy goes home to Sikes because she “can't break away from her co-dependent behavioral patterns and thus she returns to her abuser” (57). Archibald points out that “Nancy fits the profile of a battered woman” as defined by Lenore Walker, which the Victorians themselves called “‘the Magdalen problem’ in the 1830s and 1840s” (57). And while Thackery famously decried Nancy as unrealistic, Archibald regards Dickens's understanding of the battered woman's psychology as accurate when in his 1841 Preface to Oliver Twist he defended the portrayal of Nancy by saying, “It is useless to discuss whether the conduct and character of the girl seems natural or unnatural, probable or improbable, right or wrong. IT IS TRUE. Every man who has watched these melancholy shades of life, must know it to be so” (6). In the film version of Oliver!, Nancy is gainfully employed as a bar maid, and she sings “It's a Fine Life” in the pub while she serves drinks. This allows the much broader family audience of the movie house freedom from thinking that she might be a prostitute. To make perfectly clear that she is neither prostitute nor thief in the film, this Nancy sympathetically sings the lines that fancy people with “fine airs and fine graces / don't have to sin to eat” to other women at the pub whose identity as prostitutes is signified by their clothes and close proximity to male customers; Nancy shows them a kindness while she continues to serve drinks to more customers in her honest labor as bar maid. But in stage productions, the song takes place in Fagin's den, and it is Fagin who serves the gin, not Nancy. Lines expressing class solidarity recall Dodger's earlier singing to Oliver in “Consider Yourself”: “Nobody tries to be lah-di-dah and uppity / there's a cup a tea / for all.” Jolly as they most of them seem, the only one of Nancy's songs not steeped in irony is the dramatic “As Long as He Needs Me,” the abused woman's anthem. Jollity is not the same as happiness, and her story is entirely tragic. Dellamora hints that even this small kindness may have sexual undertones (40). See J. Hillis Miller for other examples in the novel of Fagin as sympathetic, indeed as the character most similar to Oliver. In other words, in Oliver Twist, Fagin is fakin' it. The line may recall Liza Doolittle's comment in My Fair Lady and Pygmalion that “Gin was mother's milk to her.” There are many examples of the boys' affection for Fagin. For example, in “Be Back Soon,” they sing without apparent irony (other than the obvious situational irony): “How could we forget / How could we let / Our dear old Fagin worry / We love him so / We'll come back home / In such a great big hurry.” The set indicates Mr. Brownlow's home primarily by putting Oliver's bed on stage. This comfortable bed—complete with mattress, pillows, sheets, comforter—indicates the upper middle class environment of his new circumstances, in great contrast to his meager sleeping arrangements in the Thieves' Kitchen and the miserable quarters at the undertakers, where he slept under the counter or among the coffins. At Mr. Brownlow's, the bed he wins stands in for Mrs. Bedwin, as plump and clean and nearly as featureless as the bedding, the only mother figure the musical gives Oliver in the end. Bart had a gift for depicting the plight of children. There may be biographical reasons for this. He came from a large family in which only seven of the eleven children lived to adulthood. He experienced the blitz as a child in London and was among those evacuated. Some critics read Oliver! quite plausibly as dealing with the loneliness of the closeted homosexual; “Where is Love?” and “As Long as He Needs Me” have special resonance along those lines. But the real force of the pain and the palpable experience in the musical is the hunger and poverty combined with the nevertheless childlike playfulness of the kids—and with Fagin as the biggest kid, in a way. He plays with his treasures in a manner more childlike than miserly, he's afraid of the bully Sikes, and—despite readings suggesting that his pickpocketing has overtones of pedophilia—he is usually acted without any hint of sexual desire. Rowan Atkinson's Fagin calls out to his “ladies,” as he calls the jewels, when they fall. This is a follow-up to his hilarious comic bit in contemplating his treasure box in Act One (before Oliver spies him), in which he playfully introduces a necklace named “Ruby” to another named “Pearl.” This is equally emphatic in the movie musical: Fagin starts off down the dank alleyway, but the Artful Dodger joins him, carrying a stolen wallet, which he displays to his mentor with pride. It's clear that the two scamps will continue their lives of petty crime in happy harmony.