Daily Inspiration Quote by Ron Moody

Moody’s line is a quiet flex disguised as craft talk: he’s telling you that his Fagin wasn’t built out of Dickensian gloom or villainy, but out of timing. “Comedy and revue” signals a performer’s toolkit - sketch rhythm, quick shifts of tone, a sense of the audience - and it reframes Fagin less as a literary monster and more as a stage-made survivor who knows how to work a room. That’s an important cultural move, especially for a character long loaded with ugly caricature. Moody implies that what could curdle into stereotype can be redirected by performance intelligence: make the figure nimble, charming, a hustler with an entertainer’s instincts.

The subtext is also about medium. Moody’s most famous Fagin lives in the musical Oliver!, where darkness has to share oxygen with song-and-dance pleasure. Revue training - the old variety tradition of patter, bits, and knowing winks - is practically a manual for musical theater acting. You can sell menace and humor in the same breath, then pivot before the audience has time to moralize. That tension is the point: Fagin becomes palatable without becoming harmless.

There’s a further implication about class and showbiz. Revue is working performer culture, not prestige drama. Moody is aligning Fagin with that world: the outsider who survives by wit, by hustle, by turning personality into currency. He’s telling us his Fagin is, above all, a professional - and that professionalism is what makes the character unsettlingly charismatic.