It's hard to think of a musical more suited to the current moment than Oliver! First of all, it's snowy and showy and Londony, so it's suited for the holidays. More deeply, it's about the excesses of a free market and the ways it corrupts and deforms people. There's the corpulent headmaster of an orphanage, Mr. Bumble, who horrifyingly sells off one of the kids in his care, Oliver Twist, because the little guy annoys him by saying that he's hungry; there's an undertaker and his wife, who can only be described as morbid entrepreneurs, who buy the kid; and there's a den of thieves profiting from the spoils of the industrial revolution by picking the pockets of the wealthier classes, their operation presided over by a venal, gold-hoarding criminal named Fagin who takes financial advantage of his boys while pretending to take care of them…
