Phil Scott stars in a unique and perhaps the most successful show that he has produced to date.

Phil Scott is no stranger to cabaret festival audiences but this year’s festival sees him in something unique and perhaps within the most successful show that he has produced to date. With Reviewing the Situation, Scott and his director Terence O’Donnell, have moved on from the more locally topical review style with which we’ve associated him, a move which started with his last piece for Adelaide – a biographical piece on the popular tenor, Mario Lanza. With Reviewing the Situation, it’s now onto undoubtedly Britain’s most successful music theatre composer of the magical Sixties period, Lionel Bart’s (nee Begleiter) rags to riches and back again life, a composer of musicals best know for his adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, simply called Oliver! And it’s all too appropriate to present it as part of the Barry Humphries’ festival as he had Mr. Sowerberry in the original West End run.

Bart reached amazing heights for one who couldn’t read music. He’d whistle or sing and leave others to transcribe it into black notes on a stave. And even before Oliver! created a sensation, he’d already written Living Doll for Cliff Richard and Tommy Steel’s Little White Bull, going on to write a Bond theme, To Russia with Love and a few other West End musicals of varying success.

The considerable success he did have lead to a life of excess, partying with the likes of Noel Coward, Nureyev and Judy Garland not to mention the Beatles and the Stones in a twenty seven roomed Chelsea pad, ‘The Fun Palace’. (Interestingly according to Andrew Oldham, the Rolling Stones’ first manager, he would fund and write for the young and beautiful Marianne Faithfull’s sortie into the recording studio). The man spent money profligately with vast amounts going on drink and drugs, when coupled with bad business decisions, led to his losing the lot and living in a small flat above Acton, and this where and how we meet Scott’s Bart.

Scott presents it all in a fine Cockney accent with a bottle of ‘mother’s ruin’ always at the ready, and one can only feel sympathy when he is fleeced by a male lover who gets off (scott-free as it were) at a time when homosexuality was still illegal and Blair, understandably, ‘in the closet’. Similarly Bart’s songs are woven in and out off the fabric of his life adding a layer of poignancy particularly when he sings, As Long as He Needs Me; it takes on a whole different sense of meaning. Yet for all of his troubles in life, it is for Oliver! that he will be remembered. Even today the show has at least fifty productions around the world on the go.

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