As Musicals go, Lionel Bart’s Oliver! has a lot to commend it: a great story and instantly memorable songs. The 1968 film version starring Ron Moody won six Oscars. There’s just the issue of Charles Dickens’s villain, the Jewish crook Fagin. Yes, he’s played for laughs, but don’t we all prefer it when a Jew is trusted with the part?
Rest assured, Fagin in the new Leeds Playhouse production is the Jewish comedian Steve Furst. He is no stranger to musicals having starred in Matilda and Made In Dagenham in London’s West End. He’s well-known as a comedian and actor having appeared in scores of TV shows, notably Little Britain and Manhunt. His talents also extend to radio presenting and writing.
Furst, 56, who often performs as his alter-ego Lenny Beige, has a face born for comedy — lugubrious, both melancholic and gleeful. Like a lot of comedians, he’s absolutely serious in conversation; thoughtful but open and friendly.
He grew up in north London and performing is in his DNA. “My father, Janos Furst, was a Hungarian Jew from Budapest and was a conductor and a fiddle player. He was orphaned during the Second World War — one of his parents died in a camp and the other was shot. But he stayed in Hungary because he was a prodigy.
“Then when the revolution happened in 1956, he left with loads of other people and ended up in Paris, and then in Ireland, where he met my mother.”After his parents divorced, his mother married Ralph Kirshbaum, a virtuoso cellist. He’s now a professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles where they live.“My father died in 2008 but he and Ralph were great friends.”
He tells me a favourite story: “My father was conducting Ralph playing the Elgar concerto, live on the BBC. Five minutes before the start they were both sat in their boxer shorts in the dressing room with their pressed dress trousers hanging up, playing a game of Scrabble, not wanting to draw themselves away.”
He appreciates his rich musical inheritance. “I realised that I was never good enough to do that at their level, but I’m a multi-instrumentalist. I’ve got the gene and the desire to play. Obviously I’ve inherited talent in other ways as well.”
His Fagin will play the fiddle.“We were talking and working out what I could do with a violin, and I think it would suit Fagin and it would fit in with our band in the show, which is sort of Klezmer-esque.”
He was inspired to become a comedian by shows such as Monty Python and The Comic Strip. “My school didn’t do drama but then I did a drama degree, which was a quite practical degree. And I sort of fell into doing stand-up and then doing the Lenny Beige character, which got me into performing and doing cabaret.”
Beige is a fake-tanned, cigar smoking, jewellery-wearing parody of a supper-club entertainer, loosely based on one of his all-time heroes, Anthony Newley. “I was invited to see him performing. I mean, I was aware of him, but when I saw him sing and perform, my jaw was on the floor. I had already had the idea of my Lenny Beige character. Then I thought ‘This is Lenny. This is exactly who Lenny should be.’ So then it became an obsession quite quickly.”
He’s a member of the Newley Society, friends with Newley’s daughter Tara and arranges Newley nights and shows; “I love him. So, this whole world, this whole East End thing that he and Lionel Bart had, fascinates me. I’d have loved to have seen Newley play Fagin. Coming to this and sort of immersing myself in Lionel Bart as well as Fagin has been great.”
His other comedy hero is the French actor and director Jacques Tati. “My dad used to take me to see Jacques Tati films and he used laugh like a drain every time he’d see Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. I embraced all of that.”
Furst is also familiar from a series of seminal cinema ads for Orange. The plot was always the same: a Hollywood star would pitch their new project to the “Orange film funding board” consisting of the actor Brennan Brown and Furst. “It was well-paid and glorious, and I got to go to America. I haven’t done an advert in over a decade though, but there is one that’s just gone out for Heinz Beans.” In this our hero packs a suitcase full of tins of beans to take on holiday before his luggage gets mislaid. Furst spends most of the ad crying at the loss.
He and his wife Rebecca Evans recently moved from Lincolnshire back to London. He has two children from his previous marriage to the actress Wendy Watson. “I’ve got two grown-up kids, my daughter is in LA visiting my parents. She wants to be a film director. And my son, who is on his second gap year, I have no worries about. He’s ridiculously assured and confident!”
With the phenomenal rise in antisemitism in the UK since October 7, I wondered whether he had encountered any issues.
“Michaela Stern, who is also in the cast, is Jewish too. I’ve not felt for a second that stuff is done or said which might make us, or anyone, feel uncomfortable.
It’s not like when I did the show at the Royal Court, Jews. In Their Own Words. Sometimes during that run there were incidents. I mean, if we were doing that play there now, well I can’t imagine.
“Look this is a family musical. People might not like the staging or something but they’re not going to be standing outside with placards.
“Remember, at heart, Fagin is a lovable rogue, he’s almost the light relief!”
Oliver! is on at Leeds Playhouse until 27 January
leedsplayhouse.org.uk
