I'm reviewing the situation …can Fagin be a villain all his life?

Evelyn, the part I play in Coronation Street, is a chip off the same block, but she has no religious affiliation. Her comedy is the same seam as Corrie legends Ena Sharples, Martha Longhurst and Minnie Caldwell, talking pointed serendipity in’t Snug, at the Rover’s Return, and Street lovers love her for that, amid all the regular, everyday murders and serial abuse. Such is life in a soapy world. I long for a scene where Mary (Patti Clare) and I just discuss Donald Trump’s hair or what her reaction was to the musical version of Ben-Hur.

We took four grandchildren to the matinee of Oliver! last weekend and no child enjoyed it more than the child in me. What a great show. What incredible lyrics and music, both composed by one man, the late Lionel Bart, the seventh child of a tailor. His parents had fled Galicia after Ukrainian pogroms. He was born Lionel Begleiter in Stepney. He took the name Bart after seeing a bus on its way to St. Bartholomew’s (St Bart’s) Hospital. A teacher earmarked him at the age of six as a musical genius, but he never learnt to read or notate music. In fact, the tunes from Oliver! were hummed at his friend Eric Rogers, who transcribed and orchestrated them.

After a chequered attendance at St Martin’s School of Art Lionel gave up on painting and joined the Communist Party and the left-wing Unity Theatre. He was poached by Joan Littlewood to stage manage at the Theatre Royal Stratford East and began to write songs for her shows and for British pop stars. He wrote Living Doll, the No 1 hit for Cliff Richard, and began the earning power that would take him into making £16 every minute – yes I’ve been googling – and when Oliver! was a hit on Broadway and became a masterly film version, he became known as the father of the British musical.

His descent into alcoholism and penury resembled Oliver Twist’s story in reverse. He bought houses and threw cocaine-fuelled parties. Hangers on bled him dry. At one point he sold the rights to Oliver! to his friend Max Bygraves for  £350. Bygraves sold them on, weeks later, for £250,000. Some friend.

Cameron Mackintosh gave Bart a generous profit share on the Oliver! revivals and he recovered his sobriety, with the help of true friends such as Barry Humphries and John Gorman but lost the battle to save his diseased liver and died at 65. He was loved by all who stuck by him and his legacy was my joy last weekend in the stalls.

I must mention of Simon Lipkin’s Fagin in respect of my earlier conjecture about playing the stereotypical Jew. His Fagin is assimilated. There are no putty noses or greasy hair and no toe-squirming accent. Mr Lipkin goes instead for a disingenuous, piratical, mercurial eccentricity that is utterly real, multi-layered and gloriously funny. His movements are those of a dancer – the director is the great dance pioneer Matthew Bourne of Swan Lake fame – and his fingers and eyes are as expressive as those of Marcel Marceau, another great Jewish hero of mine, and a hero of the French Resistance. Lipkin’s performance alone, made this old thespian, who, frankly, is often disappointed in big musicals, very happy.
Kenneth Tynan once wrote of Sir Laurence Olivier that in everyday life he spent 30 seconds summing up what you wanted him to be and ten seconds becoming it. Lipkin’s performance, the way he became braggart, avuncular, cowardly, Withnail and I or childlike, dependent on whom he was addressing, brought into my mind “Sir” as I knew Olivier, whom I also watched with awe at close quarters. He was an early influencer and in our business, you gotta pick a pocket or two.

Once, remorseful that I was working when my mother Zelma was visiting, I bought her and a friend tickets for a must-see musical. It may have been The Phantom of the Opera, in its earliest days but I know it cost more than her first trip to Rimini. Afterwards back home I asked if she had enjoyed it. “Mmm…” She was not going to give me the satisfaction. “It was good but… you know… well it was a musical. Far fetched.”

When My Fair Lady was at its height on Broadway and you couldn’t get a ticket if you sold your kidney, a man in the front stalls noticed an empty seat by a fancily dressed elderly woman. He asked her why she had no one in the seat beside her.

“Oh”, she replied. “I booked them months ago. But my husband’s passed away.”

“I’m so sorry,” said the man. “Couldn’t you have asked a friend to come with you?”

“Not really,” she mused. “They’re all at the funeral.”