The video below is a professional musical trailer which is just to encourage you to keep reading this post.
Sure, you might not be planning on doing something similar with your group of boys and girls… or maybe you are!!!
With our adaptation, at least, you can get as close as possible.
Any questions you may have leave them down below at the end of this post and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
This post is about the Musical of Oliver Twist. I will not tell you about the musical itself because you probably already know it, but rather about what we did to adapt it for our young actors to reproduce it.
To begin with, we did not rely on the original script of the musical as we wrote one ourselves. The original script of the musical was so extensive that it would have been very difficult for us to adapt it to suit our needs. So what we did was read the original novel and then read a novel which was adapted for children (story type). With these two readings we then made our own script.
We took into account the number of children we had, in order to adapt the characters to match the number of actors we had.
The scenes we removed or modified were the most dramatic or upbeat scenes, like the first scene where Oliver’s mother is seen dying, or the tavern scene where Oohm Pah Pah is sung. Instead, we played this song at the end of the play as a farewell.
The script is reduced enough so that the children do not have as too much work of memorization, as they also had to dance and sing.
Oliver is a musical with beautiful songs, however, some of them are very lyrical. We decided to adapt the songs that we thought were most appealing and fun for the boys and girls to interpret. In terms of scenery, we had a set decorated as Fagin’s cave, which was the most spectacular and as for the rest we left it as a black background with only a few decorative elements.
The musical lasts for around 1 hour including all the music and songs. We all our 35 children from the workshop (at that time) involved, but not all of them had lines.
There are 23 characters in the script, which you can distribute as you wish (boys or girls), but you can have an actor or actress play more than one role. The rest of the actors or actresses only took part in the dancing or singing. What we liked most was that so many children of different ages participated together in a joint project and there was an atmosphere of collaboration and implication.
I strongly encourage you to make this musical, it was our first big challenge and it was a great success which was enriching for the parents, friends and family, as well as for all the boys and girls in the workshop.
Of 14 pages
14 scenes
38 characters:
14 actors/actresess only dance
14 boys
8 girls
2 either girl or boy
We did get some girls to play boy roles and vice versa and the dancers are also very variable in this sense.
Gloriós Pa – Glorius Food.
Estimat Amic – Consider Yourself
Buscant a la butxaca de rics – Pick a pocket or two
Jo puc fer-ho tot – I’d do anything
Torneu aviat – Be back soon
On és l’amor? – Where is Love?
Si em necessites – As long as he needs me
Oohm Pah Pah a mi
Here we leave you with a small fragment of the script. And here is a link to the page where you will find more information and test audios of the songs.
Ahhh !!! Please leave any questions you may have down in the comments below in this post.
Remember:
If you want to see more information about Oliver Twist the Musical, click here.
If you want to see more information about all the musicals we have, click here
Leave a Reply