Biblical epic retold with Sunday school seriousness
The Prince of Egypt
Stephen Schwartz made his fortune with that devilishly clever spin on The Wizard of Oz, Wicked (2003) – a show that has been seen by 60million worldwide (10million in London alone) and grossed $5billion (£3.8 billion). But he first made his name with Godspell (1971), his hippy-era, communal-clownish presentation of Christ’s parables.
At 71, he has returned to the Good Book, adding 10 songs to five of the batch he contributed to the successful (if so-so) Dreamworks animation, The Prince of Egypt (1998), which included the anthemic, Oscar-winning When You Believe. The film told the story of Moses from his river-borne cradle to the watery grave of the Egyptian army, during the flight of the Hebrews from bondage. Riches to rags stuff.
Those hoping for a revisionist spin à la Wicked, take note: this is Exodus, delivered with Sunday-school seriousness, complete with re-enacted Passover. That said, Schwartz digs like a tentative archaeologist, teasing out (with book writer Philip Lazebnik) drama in the divergence of fraternal destinies, the burdens of patriarchy, the ethics of slavery.
These complexities are nicely registered by the lithe leads – Luke Brady, bringing a David Essexy twinkle to miracle-working Moses, and Liam Tamne, succumbing to self-entombing sternness as Ramses (albeit sounding more Cricklewood than Cairo).
The reverence puts the show in the same category as Schwartz’s Children of Eden (1991), a well-meaning but anodyne account of Genesis, which ran for only four months in the West End; this should have a longer life.
Should we be cynical? The allure of the epic is combined with something slightly synthetic. Initially sceptical, I came to the view, however, that Schwartz is acting in good faith – it appears he simply wants to do justice to a cornerstone part of Judaism; arguably more interested in the prophet’s motives than driven by the profitmotive. If the artistic value is variable, the show has cultural clout and gathering emotional heft.
Generating much pomp and bling, Schwartz’s director son Scott achieves a fantastic coup de théâtre at the climax, Egyptian soldiers tumbling, amid simulated walls of water, into the chasm of the orchestra pit. But his mise-en-scène reaps mixed dividends. Projections clash with an earthy aesthetic that has the energetic ensemble straining to evoke, through dance and rolling around on the stage, a chariot race, a river, a rippling desert, the burning bush and so on.
The first half swings between the sublime and the ridiculous – courting theatrical deathliness on the Nile. But the agony of the Israelites and the ecstasy of their escape is relayed with incremental force. Schwartz’s score – weaving various appropriate Middle Eastern influences together – comes into its own in a rash of blistering Bible-belters in the second half. I wasn’t so much converted as bludgeoned into a state of admiration by the heavenly host of rousing choruses. And that’s no small feat.