Musical: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
The London Palladium W1 (020-7087 7757). Until 8 September Running time: 2hrs ★★★★
“Is this a show or a cult,” asked Ann Treneman in The Times. As I left this lavish new Palladium production of the enduringly popular 1970s musical, the entire audience was “standing and swaying, singing and clapping”. Everyone present appeared thrilled to the point of ecstasy to be witnessing this admittedly vibrant new staging of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s much-loved first musical. I am “not a member of the cult”, but I can see that this staging has got serious “mojo”. It’s wildly kitsch and unashamedly “camp-tastic”. The use of child actors in minor adult roles works a charming treat (fake beards and moustaches are very much in evidence). And Jac Yarrow, a 21-year-old fresh out of the Arts Educational Schools, gives a star-makingly triumphant turn in the title role.
It’s a “blast” of an evening, said Nick Curtis in the London Evening Standard – the “basic Biblical musical” reborn as a slice of “all-singing all-dancing exuberance”. Director Laurence Connor breathes “zesty new life” into the potent yet over-familiar songs, helped by an energetic performance from Sheridan Smith as The Narrator. She belts out songs, hoofs her way through the dance routines and takes on a series of hilarious cameo roles. And in Yarrow the production has found a rare actor with “enough charm to imbue the blank lead character with some personality”. This is a delight: “submit to it”.
It’s a sensational debut, agreed Michael Billington in The Guardian. Yarrow plays Joseph as a “naive dreamer slowly waking up to his prophetic gifts” and he stops the show with Close Every
Door, delivered with rising anguish. He gives the impression “he was born on the Palladium stage”. But just as you think Yarrow has walked off with the show, up pops Jason Donovan’s Pharaoh “amid MGM-levels of gilded pomp”, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Donovan expertly milks every “over-extended moment of his Elvisy rock number, hip-thrusting with a machismo that belies his feline Egyptian eye-shadow”.