Word: fagin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After this, the audience knows that nothing painful, nothing honest, nothing real will be inflicted upon it. In Oliver twisted, the Thieves' Kitchen becomes an urban Sherwood Forest, with Robin Hood Fagin teaching his pickpocketeers to rob from the rich and give to the deserving poor-themselves. The grim workhouses, stews and drinking dens of London become playgrounds for boys with a taste for adventure. The biggest laugh of the evening comes when Fagin paternally growls at his charges, "Shut up and drink...
...confidence, on reaching Broadway, to overplay characters that were already over written to the point of caricature. The cast also knows where all the laughs are buried, and it squirrels them out with stagy anticipatory glee. Bruce Prochnik's Oliver is singularly unaffecting, but Clive Revill's Fagin glints with eccentricity. This Fagin is not very Jewish (he has been viewed without alarm by representatives of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith), but he is a strangely epicene miser whose furtive batlike swoopings on his treasure box and triple-tempo fingering...
Considering the vulgar travesty it is, Oliver! is not as bad a show as it ought to be. The archetypal force of the Dickens story still faintly magnetizes the stage. Fagin is a kind of storybook witch, but the power of witches exists to be broken. Oliver is destined for storybook transformation-the ill-born pauper turned well-born prince, the maltreated underling who bests his oppressors, the orphan boy who finds a father and a home. Every boy who ever had a nightmare or a dream, every adult who ever yearned for renewal or rebirth, feels the pull...
...unsuccessful. Fiedler's specialty is the small, perfect detail, like the tuft of thick, sweaty hair the narrator spies curling from the heroine's decolletage. Jewish loathing of Jewishness is. of course, a standard nasty story theme, and Fiedler's Jews - malicious caricatures be side whom Fagin would resemble King David - treat their religion as if it were a particularly unpleasant sort of eczema...
...best chapter in this group is the one on Dickens. Comparing Fagin to all the other Jew-villains in English literature, Rosenberg notes the vital difference: "Marlowe's and Shakespeare's Jews assert themselves actively against their persecution and regard it as a source of terror. The point is that none of them can be sensibly appreciated without an awareness of the restrictions which prevent them from participating fully in the social world. There comes a point at which Barabas, the professional poisoner, ceases to be a satanic figure and can lecture Ferneze on the conditions of injustice without immediately...