After over 20 years, 'Oliver!' director comes full circle

EAU CLAIRE — Nate Plummer of the Chippewa Valley Theatre Guild feels that he is right back where he started — in the best way possible.

“I actually started with the Theater Guild back in 1999 as a kid being in shows. When we did ‘Oliver!’ back in 2001, that was my actual first main stage show that I participated in,” said Plummer.

And now, over twenty years later, he’s back at it again — this time as director of the Theater Guild’s production of “Oliver!”

“It’s a very powerful story, and to get to tell it in the way that we’re getting to tell it in the Jamf Theatre with the audience being so close to the show and so close to the action — it really allows us to tell the story in a way that we haven’t ever been able to tell it before in the Chippewa Valley,” he said.

The musical, written by Lionel Bart in 1960 and playing London’s West End the same year, is the story of Oliver Twist, the titular character from the book written by Charles Dickens back in 1837. Twist is a young child living in an orphanage in Victorian England.

He escapes from a workhouse and falls into an abusive apprenticeship. He eventually gets taken in by a group of pickpockets and thieves, who further manipulate him. Along the way, Oliver simply tries to find a sense of belonging and and find a feeling of being loved.

“That’s kind of the the moral theme of the show is one of the most famous songs in the show — Oliver’s solo, ‘Where Is Love?,’” said Plummer. “The thing that always sticks with me with the show is that’s a very adult question to ask. Where is love? And how do I find it? That’s not just something that we ask kids, we ask adults that question too.”

He stressed that the play, while it has uplifting moments, is overall one that is rather dark in tone, with violence, theft, abuse (both physical and emotional), and even murder. Regardless, those elements are essential to telling the story of Twist.

“When we sugar coat the story, we lose what is really a powerful message that Charles Dickens was trying to tell us back in the 1830s, which was: look at the world through the eyes of the child and see if this is really the way we want the world to be.” he said. “I think it allows us ... to ask those questions of: how are we interacting with our children today? And is this really the world we want them to grow up in?”

When “Oliver Twist” was penned by Dickens, the landscape was quite a bit different, and any sort of protection against children being used as a source of labor being non-existent, with poor children often being put to work in textile mills and coal mines at an early age. “It really started a political movement of child labor law reforms and all of that over in the U.K. So it’s always been a little more of a socio-political piece,” said Plummer.

The Guild agreed to put on the show last year, and since then, child labor has one again become a question, particularly in Wisconsin. The timing was a fluke, Plummer stated, but that being said, he said that the show “asks a lot of very important questions and I think that’s fate telling us this was the right time to do this show and to tell this story.”

Plummer isn’t the only one to come back to the show. Audiences may recognize actor Jim Finn from many shows, including “Oliver,” but is also known for playing Scrooge in local productions of another Dickens classic, “A Christmas Carol.” Here he plays Fagin, one of the main characters of the show, a veteran criminal who lures Oliver into his gang of thieves.

“To get to work with him again now as an adult is really cool and Jim Finn is a name that a lot of people in the Chippewa Valley will know and recognize,” said Plummer. He applauded working with Finn again and looked forward to make it so that he was “giving that same opportunity to the other boys in the cast” that he had back in 2001.

“So who knows who might be inspired to create theater as a result of being part of this production? It’s just a really cool, exciting thing that many of us on the show are very passionate about, and we’re very glad to get the opportunity to do that,” he said.