For a show about child abuse, domestic violence, organised crime, whoring, alcoholism, kidnapping and murder, Oliver! is a surprisingly chirpy proposition for a night out. The opening of Rupert Goold’s zippy new production, though, suggests otherwise.

The curtain comes up on a grey refectory, with grey walls and high grey windows, into which troop doleful hecatombs of grey tots bearing grey tin bowls, like some midget production of Ivan Denisovich. Above them, in doom-laden capitals, hangs the motto “GOD IS LOVE”. Yet within moments, rather than reflecting on that important truth, the little wretches are warbling about sausages and “in-di-gest-shun”, and the whole thing kicks off.

It’s now near as dammit 50 years since Peter Coe’s original production, and the show still works a treat. Lionel Bart’s songs are pretty much unsinkable, and Cameron Mackintosh’s giant cast — more than 80, not including the dog and its stunt double — set about them with gusto.

Times Archive, 1960: Oliver! at the New Theatre

Lionel Bart's musical version of Oliver Twist is presented with gusto but perhaps inevitably is something of a hotch-potch

• Oliver Twist as a musical: Work of Mr Lionel Bart

This is a slickly reverential, rather than a mould-breaking, production. That’s proper, I reckon. Wicked Bill Sikes (Burn Gorman), for example, was all present and correct. Battered hat? Check. Big cudgel to clonk on nearby objects? Check. Growly voice? Check. Dog with a head twice the size of its body, and collapsible girlfriend? Check and check again: Nancy went down like a rail of shirts.

Before she went down, though, she was terrific. Jodie Prenger auditioned for her role of Nancy in the television talent show I’d Do Anything. I don’t know what she did do, but it got her the part. I thought she was great, earthy and warm. When she opened up the old bellows on As Long as He Needs Me, I could see shivers sneaking up the spines of the people in front, even through their coats.

The other standout was the Dodger. The first act of petty larceny any self-respecting Artful Dodger commits is to steal the show from the weedy lead character. A splendidly strutting Ross McCormack did just that within moments of taking the stage (with his blond curls and just-born face, he actually managed to look at least two years younger than Oliver, who himself looked about 10), and Oliver never quite got it back.

The money name, of course, was Rowan Atkinson as Fagin. The difficulty for him coming into this role is, unusually, not getting out from under Mr Bean and Blackadder, but getting out from under Ron Moody, whose twinkly, wheedling Fagin in the original production (and for decades since) more or less defined the role. All Fagins are, willy-nilly, condemned to some extent to impersonating Moody.

Atkinson channelled Moody in the speaking voice — and he really seems to be able to sing — but brought plenty to it himself. With his straggly-on-top and long-down-the-sides hair, he looked like a 1970s version of Salman Rushdie, and poured on the physical comedy to play Fagin more for laughs than pathos. He got the laughs in abundance. That’s in keeping with the rest of this production, which skates happily along the show’s surface.

The trick with Oliver! seems to me to be keeping the triangular relationship between Fagin, Bill and Nancy plausible: Bill needs to be scary, but has to somehow inhabit the same dramatic space as this saintly tart-with-a-heart and a criminal confederate who’s at least 60% comic turn. Goold’s production managed it — though at the cost, slightly, of scariness.

Is it prissy, however, to find Fagin just a bit iffy in this day and age? In addition to giving the world a handful of stupendous show tunes, Oliver! did domesticate an anti-semitic stereotype that was already old and ugly in Dickens’s day. I suppose we’ve decided it’s okay on the grounds that it’s heritage anti-semitism and, well, there’s not much of a show without him.

Still, it is pretty gobsmacking.

I mean, the show’s logo, on the posters, has refashioned the L of Oliver into a gigantic great nose. You might as well chuck in a black character who goes round eating watermelon, stealing chickens and grinning his head off. Perhaps it’s simply the case that the character has metabolised the stereotype and rendered it harmless, like comedy Chinese people in panto. Anyway, if it's cool with the Board of Deputies, I suppose it’s cool with me.

The sets, incidentally, are spectacularly well done. The dome of St Paul’s thrusts skyward; the narrow streets of the City close and shift as Oliver flees through them; a manhole opens and plunges us into Fagin’s underground, um, laundry.

Goold’s production is pacey and mobile without being fussy. People are for ever rushing across bridges above the stage or galloping round the front of the pit. And there’s an interlude of pure Tim Burton gothic, during Oliver’s brief career as an undertaker’s mute — Julian Bleach’s Sowerberry a dead ringer for Riff Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

You’ll love it. But it’s worth not thinking too deeply about the moral messages it gives out: if you’re a crook, you’ll get away with it; if you’re determined to do good, you’ll be beaten to death; if your grandparents are posh, destiny will reunite you with their money; and if you’re the rest of the orphans, and born common, you can sing about sausages all you like, but you’ll still die in the workhouse of malnutrition and tuberculosis.

Uplifting stuff for hard times. The night that I saw it, Oliver! got two-thirds of a standing ovation, which seemed about right to me.

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