Oliver!

Oliver! begins with a hungry orphan asking for a second helping of gruel, and follows what that one act of impertinence costs him: sold off by the workhouse, chased into the city, and taken in by a gang of child pickpockets who treat him better than anyone has so far.

Oliver falls in with the Artful Dodger and, through him, Fagin, who runs a household of boys and a profitable line in stolen handkerchiefs. It is warm, funny and entirely criminal. Circling it are Bill Sikes, who frightens everyone, and Nancy, who loves Sikes and looks after Oliver, and whose loyalty in both directions cannot hold indefinitely. What Oliver wants is simpler than any of them realise: somewhere to belong.

Lionel Bart wrote the book, music and lyrics, adapting Charles Dickens's novel Oliver Twist, and the show first opened in 1960. Bart turned a bleak serial about child poverty into a score of singable, deceptively cheerful numbers, and it has been revived steadily ever since, one of the few musicals whose songs are known by people who have never seen it.

The tone swings hard and on purpose. A pickpocketing lesson played as pure comedy sits a few scenes from real violence, and the score keeps offering warmth right up to the moment it is withdrawn. Children are at the centre of nearly every number, which is what gives the darker turns their sting.

It works for audiences of almost any age, though not as a soft evening out. The tunes are irresistible and the story underneath them is not, and hearing a room sing along to a song about a child being bought and sold is a strange thing to sit inside.