IF HE had written only Oliver! Karen Lancaster and Jonathan Rosen as Widow Corney and Mr Bumble in Impact Theatre's 2008 production of Lionel Bart's 'Oliver!' directed by Amanda Noar.
Title details and video sharing options. Just the front-end of the mammoth production number from Lionel. The official website of Child Star Actor Mark Lester, Star of Oliver (1968), Mark Lester is also the God Father to Michael Jackson's children. Oliver Twist himself couldn't have asked for more. Every night, the dirty-faced urchin star of the West End revival of Lionel Bart's musical masterpiece takes his bow. The New Wimbledon Theatre, The Broadway, London. Formerly - The Wimbledon Theatre, Corner of Merton Road and Russell Road. See also in this area - The.
Bumble lead the Lionel Bart song, in director Carol Reed.
Obituary: Lionel Bart . His other work included shows such as Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be and Maggie May, plus many pop songs including . It was like a musical East. Enders, but far more joyous and celebratory, without the unremitting angst suffered by the inhabitants of Albert Square. Bart also epitomised the Sixties in a less happy way - like many who flourished in that era he was seduced by sudden success into a world of drink, drugs and hedonism, squandering his money and his youth.
Bart was one of the 1. East End tailor. He was born Lionel Begleiter, in 1. He displayed a flair for drawing, however, which brought him at the age of 1.
St Martin's School of Art in London. He started writing songs in response to a sign asking for musical material for one of the theatre's productions. Unable to write music, he would tap out the melody with one finger and someone else would orchestrate it. It was a time when popular music was undergoing a drastic transformation due to the influence of such stars as Elvis Presley and Bill Haley, and Bart was one of many musicians and singers (most of them Presley- influenced) who frequented the 2 I's coffee shop in Soho, where he met the rock singer Tommy Steele. With Michael Pratt and Steele, Bart wrote Steele's first hit, .
Blessed with a cast aptly assembled by Littlewood, including Miriam Karlin, Barbara Windsor, James Booth, Yootha Joyce, Toni Palmer and George Sewell (who was to play Bill Sykes in Oliver!), it played to packed houses and eventually moved to the Garrick Theatre in the West End, where it ran for two years. Bart's ingratiating score included an infectious (if derivative) title tune, a Presley- type rock number .
He had also provided songs for Tommy Steele's film Tommy the Toreador and at the end of the year won four Novello Awards - for the year's best- selling song (. Based on a much- loved Dickens novel, and Bart for the first time providing his own libretto as well as music and lyrics, Oliver! Of British musicals, only Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend, which premiered seven years earlier, could be said to have had such a roof- raising, rapturous reception in the last half- century. The show received 2. Bart's score was lauded next day for its richness and variety, from rousing show- stoppers like .
He entertained vigorously, his friends including Noel Coward, Brian Epstein, Judy Garland, Alma Cogan and Shirley Bassey, and he spent weekends in Mustique with Princess Margaret, who was later, according to Bart, to call him a . Bart himself would later place some of the blame on his upbringing. I hated money and had no respect for it. My attitude was to spend it as I got it.
When he was looking for a writer to help ghost his memoirs, several noted authors turned him down, one of them telling me bluntly, . Its strongest talking- point was the massive set by Sean Kenny (who had also done sterling work on Oliver!) which literally self- destructed during a bombing raid. For his old friend Joan Littlewood, Bart next composed a title song and theme music for her film Sparrows Can't Sing (1. Barbara Windsor and James Booth, and he had a hit with the title song for the James Bond film From Russia With Love (1. Matt Monro. Bart wrote the music and lyrics for his next stage musical, Maggie May (1. Harvey Orkin. Starring Rachel Roberts and Kenneth Haigh, it was a moderate success but produced no major song hits, though Judy Garland recorded four of the songs for an EP and it won the Novello Award as outstanding score of the year and the Critics' Poll as best new British musical. Bart was by now experimenting with LSD and other drugs and was drinking heavily.
By the late Seventies his drinking had brought on diabetes and by the time he managed to quit alcohol it had destroyed one- third of his liver. Much of his income was being dissipated, according to his friends, by his generosity to hangers- on and by the ease with which casual sex partners could rob him. He later estimated that relinquishing those rights lost him over a million pounds. In 1. 96. 8 Carol Reed's film verion of Oliver! Bart's score was kept virtually intact, and the soundtrack album was a best- seller. Columbia, the studio financing the film, had wanted an internationally known star (Peter Sellers) in the lead, but Reed and Bart fought to keep Moody. Their choice of Shirley Bassey to play Nancy was vetoed by the studio, who felt that if Bill Sykes was shown killing a black girl it could offend some audiences.
Four years after Twang! Based on the Fellini film La Strada, it was staged on Broadway where it ran for only one night, though Bart never gave up on it and was working on plans for a revival at the time of his death. He also wrote the score for a television version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde starring Kirk Douglas (never shown in Britain) and an unproduced stage musical, Quasimodo! In a 1. 99. 5 interview with The Independent, Bart recalled that he sent some of the script for Quasimodo!
It seems a bit abstract here and there. In 1. 97. 5 he was banned for a year for driving under the influence of drink, and in 1. Regarding the changes in the style of musical theatre, he told the musical historian Mark Steyn that he would never have written a through- sung musical becausein my case it would be slightly pretentious. I'm not a composer, I just make tunes and sing them, and I sing harmonies, and some of my chord progressions are not logical, but often they work. I thought in terms of people's walks. The Oliver theme was really the Beadle's walk, a kind of dum- de- dum . Fagin's music was like a Jewish mother clucking away.
![Lionel Bart`S Oliver! [1968] Lionel Bart`S Oliver! [1968]](http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_400/MI0001/602/MI0001602186.jpg?partner=allrovi.com)
But I don't want to get high- falutin' about it. Music is important, fair enough. But just to have some kind of drab tune fitted to even more drab dialogue seems rather pointless to me. Though Bart's final years were unproductive (a 3. Abbey National Building Society was his most notable achievement of the last decade), and he could be exasperatingly demanding of his friends, he was equable about his change in fortunes - he once had homes in London, New York, Malibu and Tangiers but had been living in a small flat in Acton.
Cameron Mackintosh, who successfully revived Oliver! He regrets it but, considering that everyone else has made millions out of his creations, he's never been sour, never been vindictive. Andrew Lloyd Webber said, .
The loss to British musical theatre caused by his untimely death is incalculable.