Michael Wartella and Carson Elrod in Oliver Twist Michael J. Lutch Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist By Charles Dickens Adapted by Neil Bartlett Gerald W. Lynch at John Jay College 899 Tenth Avenue 212-279-4200 more theater most popular most commented Stitching: Mission Abort by Alexis Soloski Palace of the End: Leash Fatigue by Alexis Soloski The Flat Earth Glows Sightlines by McCann, Ruth Bash'd!: Rap, Now Even Gayer Sightlines by ROB KENDT Misha Shulman's Brunch at the Luthers Sightlines by GARRETT EISLER Trash Talking With Harvey Weinstein by Tony Ortega Coming and Then Licking It Up. Is This a Gay Thing? Savage Love by Dan Savage At Home With Competitive Swallowers Crazy Legs and Eater X by Andy Kropa Gene Simmons and the Whores He Admires La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem by Graham Rayman The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal' (17) Nat Hentoff Scientology's Crushing Defeat (15) Tony Ortega Runnin' Scared: From Brooklyn, a Rap Campaign Against Tight Clothes (9) Runnin' Scared: Arcynta Ali Childs Runnin' Scared: The City Pitted Kids Against Artists in the East Village (6) Runnin' Scared: Chloé A. Hilliard Savage Love: My Boyfriend Almost Fathered a Lesbian Couple's Baby?!? (5) Savage Love: Dan Savage

Bartlett's particular stage, courtesy of longtime collaborator Rae Smith, is a grimy one. Smith has constructed a tumbledown box, arrayed with all manner of trapdoors and hidden flaps. (Smith's costumes also balance the ingenious and decayed.) Inside this box, an able cast shifts between passages of dialogue and third-person narration, nearly all drawn verbatim from the novel. Bartlett's innovations aren't textual. He leaves Dickens's language more or less inviolate while messing about with the staging, combining contemporary techniques with those from the melodramatic stage and the music hall (footlights, song breaks, frequent tableaux).

This mix of old and new makes for some arresting images. It also moves the story along swiftly, as characters take the narrative passages in turn, though Carson Elrod, the actor playing the Artful Dodger, receives the greatest share. Bartlett even has a bit of respectful fun with the authorial voice, commissioning composer Gerard McBurney to set many of Dickens's moralizing passages to music. But though he can draw on centuries of theatrical techniques, Bartlett hasn't solved the central problem for any adaptation—how to make the character of Oliver interesting.

The chorus explains in the first moments that the play "shows, in little Oliver, the principle of Good surviving through every adverse circumstance." But "principles of Good" don't translate very well on stage. They can't prance like the Artful Dodger or scheme like Fagin or threaten like Bill Sykes. Mostly, as played by Michael Wartella, Oliver can tremble and cower. Wartella makes a valiant effort, but ultimately becomes a sort of absence in the show's midst, orphaning poor Oliver once again.