Dickens Unplugged

Last weekend went to watch the musical comedy show Dickens Unplugged based on the life and works of Charles Dickens. It was done so well… absolutely hilarious and made me want to go back and read my Dickens.

A less than 2 hrs musical journey through several books, it was at breakneck speed...you would get an idea when you see the list of books covered - Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Great Expectations, The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield, The Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities...
And all this is interspersed with hilarious biographical snippets from Dickens' life, with repeated hints to his obsession with the bludgeoning scene in Oliver Twist.

Amazingly, the cast consists of only 5 male actors who enact a total of 104 characters between them and don hats, crutches and wedding gowns to play each of the characters from Dickens’ life and works. They use an incredible mix of musical styles.

The play starts with an introduction by the 4 boys from California who call themselves “the biggest Charlie Dickens Tribute Band in Santa Cruz”…
Next is a scene from Charlie Dickens’s bleak childhood at the boot blacking factory...with 2 jovial numbers - 'Made by real children' and ‘Aint Goin Back To Blackin’

The cast then reproduce Oliver Twist with the song and dance numbers from Oliver! Thoroughly enjoying themselves until Dickens himself storms in.
“Oliver Twist is bleakly realistic” he admonishes them.
“That’s way different to the movie,” is the disbelieving response.

They literally gallop through some of the stories... the complex Bleak House reduced to a 30 second country and western song...Similarly for The Old Curiosity Shop...

David Copperfield and the song on Uriah Heep was hilarious...

Either before or after DC is a snippet about Charles Dickens complicated marriage and numerous children...There’s a wonderful scene in which Dickens asks his wife to leave and she manages to encapsulate all the resentments of 18 years of less than perfect marriage into one short blistering diatribe..."I am so sick of your sh*t!"

A quite chirpy 'A Tale of Two Cities' complete with a Guillotine scene with chopped off heads was really quite brilliant...

This was followed by a bit on Charles' Dickens final years… quite hilarious...as he enacts the bludgeoning scene in Oliver Twist one last time.... finishing with his rendition of 'I’m going home to have a stroke'

Christmas Carol is then given the full treatment with Tiny Tim’s crutch doubling as an electric guitar.

Overall...I would say quite a bit of silliness...but thoroughly enjoyable...