Would You Like a Dickens Novel With That?

How I would remake Oliver!

Marmi Le
The Riff
Published in
5 min readSep 13, 2024

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Mark Lester as Oliver Twist (Credit: Columbia Pictures)

Incredibly, the OG quintessential orphan from Charles Dickens’ almost-two-centuries-old novel Oliver Twist rears his head not just once, but twice in the year 2024.

There will be another revival of the Lionel Bart stage musical in the West End this December by famed choreographer and director Matthew Bourne. If any of my British friends are lucky enough to go, please post us a review!

But here Stateside, earlier this year we had the great One Day series on Netflix in which a school production of Oliver! makes a hugely memorable (at least for me) appearance. It was so influential that not only did it make me rewatch the 2011 One Day movie (I wrote about it recently here), but I also watched the 1968 Best Picture Oscar winner Oliver! for the first time.

It was almost perfect, except the ending for me was so jarring

I must have mentally blocked it out because I don’t recall the story unfolding that way when I watched the Sam…

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Marmi Le
The Riff

Data nerd for longer than Gen Z has been alive, mom, and former Jeopardy contestant https://j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=2835