In his follow-up to 2011’s Coriolanus, director Ralph Fiennes fails to make a Dickensian story about Charles Dickens come to life.

Victory — not the concept, but the statue at State Place and 17th Street NW — is the Ghost of Christmas Past. Freedom — the Eastward-facing statue atop the Capitol Dome; not that thing that The Terrorists hate us for — is the Ghost of Christmas Present. And the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come arrives draped in the inky robes of Grief. This stunt-casting of local landmarks as Charles Dickens’ familiar trio of…

Perhaps not every reader spent long car rides singing along with her family to the soundtrack of Oliver! like this DCist, but the story’s familiar to anyone who’s tackled Charles Dickens, or grew up on the somewhat-forgotten Disney classic, Oliver And Company. Olney Theatre has taken the dusty but resilient old musical, based on the life of a lonely orphan and his association with a band of thieves, and given it brisk pacing and a…