Everybody’s Dying This Week!
I know I should be offering a tribute to Christopher Lee, one of the screen’s finest Draculas, who just died at 93. Instead, I find myself thinking about the just-announced death of Ron Moody, who played Fagin in the movie version of “Oliver!” and who just died at 91. Even as a boy dreaming of show-biz glory, and willing to do anything to achieve it, I never had a hankering to be in a production of “Oliver!” There was something a little too creepy about a grown man running a residence full of fetching boys engaged in crime. Although Fagin’s quasi-pedophilia never bothered me as much as the relationship between Nancy and Bill Sikes. Just after Nancy is beaten up by Bill, she sings “As Long As He Needs Me.” In this season’s “Gigi” on Broadway, they wouldn’t let the old man sing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.” But in productions of “Oliver!” they still let Nancy sing a love song to her domestic abuser? Something wrong there.
