I’m reviewing this as a smash hit situation

WHAT extraordinary excitement Lionel Bart's Oliver! still stirs, almost 50 years after the critics first rained down applause upon this back-to-music-hall rendition of Charles Dickens's London melodrama-novel. What, though, this time kept the first-nighters teetering on the verge of delighted hysteria throughout the almost £5 million extravaganza?

Was it perhaps the fact that Anthony Ward's wonderful sets brought to life in vivid style the Victorian equivalent of a 21st century, begrimed, sink-estate? St Paul's Cathedral, London Bridge, a viaduct, tall tenement buildings in murky, narrow streets, down which streaked boys from the juvenile underworld - all these moved, rose up, went down, shifted and retreated like living things. Even the atmospheric skies, whether pink or blue, looked as if they needed to be sent back to central cleaning to remove excess of industrial grime and smoke. How appropriate, then, that in this Oliver! where design comes first, Bill Sikes should spectacularly topple to his death from a chimney.

Or was success owed to Rowan Atkinson's mildly semitic Fagin, all dressed down in lank, thinning hair and wisps of beard, more frightened than frightening? Did they rate him a glassy eyed maestro of pick-pocketing, voice glue-thick even when singing, as he leered, jeered and gloated his way around his thieves' den of willing juveniles, reminding them You've Got To Pick A Pocket Or Two? Perhaps no one could resist the lure of Jodie Prenger, the girl who fought it out in BBC1's I'd Do Anything and secured the role of the put-upon Nancy. With a blasting foghorn of a voice and a physique that looked almost big and firm enough to cause Burn Gorman's superbly ominous, thuggish threat of a Bill Sikes to think twice about violence, Prenger duly melted and belted out that anthem for masochistic, battered women everywhere As Long As He Needs Me. With what stupid loyalty her Nancy scooped up the sweetly spoken and sung Oliver of a soulful Harry Stott and helped return him to his captors - all for love of Bill.

I pose these questions because I did not that greatly succumb to Bart's Oliver. I came out hymning the praises of designer Ward. Those hungry boys still sing Food Glorious Food with touching ardour, Oom-Pah- Pah is old music hall deftly modernised and Matthew Bourne's choreography looks neatly animated. Yet I felt director Rupert Goold, whose revelatory productions of Macbeth and Six Characters In Search Of An Author have deservedly made him the theatre's latest golden boy, came up with a traditional, unadventurous Oliver.

He kept to the line of Sam Mendes's Palladium production too closely. He rendered the nasty, violent and corrupt world of Oliver Twist rather pantomimic - only Julian Bleach as the sinister undertaker, Mr Sowerberry singing That's Your Funeral, artfully conveyed elements of the sinister, grotesque and comic. Even Atkinson, though his imagination allows him to give Fagin a touch of transvestism, left my blood mildly chilled. A smash hit, obviously, but not an historic one.