Lloyd Webber’s larky student musical strikes the right note
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
His beleaguered Cinderella may be yet to hit the stage – it’s currently scheduled to do so on Aug 18 – but at least Andrew Lloyd Webber has managed to get two shows off the ground this week. The Phantom of the Opera has returned to Her Majesty’s and Joseph, the musical that Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice wrote as larky twentysomethings in the late 1960s, is at the Palladium. Laurence Connor’s production was first seen in 2019, with Jason Donovan here reprising his role as the Pharaoh and Alexandra Burke replacing Sheridan Smith as the narrator.
No one could argue that Joseph – rather scrappy, definitely silly – rates as one of Lloyd Webber’s most accomplished shows. But Joseph undoubtedly has something: an irrepressible kitschy giddiness; an irreverent, critic-proof attitude; several cracking song and dance routines. Hell, it even has toy sheep on wheels. In other words, as we
Raising the spirits: Jac Yarrow plays Joseph with youthful relish
emerge from the darkness, ravenous for uncomplicated, transporting spectacle, it feels just right for right now.
Joseph is four fifths pastiche and one fifth power ballad, the latter prefiguring the Sturm und Drang that would define much of Lloyd Webber’s later career. Jac Yarrow – a fresh out-of-drama-school Joseph in 2019 who has retained his cherubic freshness and sincerity – certainly lends sonorous voice to the show’s occasional moment of emotional ballast, singing Close Every Door To Me from his prison cell with all the beatific anguish of a tortured boy-band star channelling Richard II. Yet while
Joseph has a story far more incidentpacked than most musicals – attempted fratricide, slavery, plagues – plot points are quickly dispensed with in the haste to get to what really matters: the next tongue-in-cheek song and dance genre mash-up.
As the narrator, Burke keeps the energy output at Hadron Collider levels, galvanising many of the set-pieces and blasting out Pharaoh Story with stage-shaking gusto, even if she has yet to fully master the role’s tricky mix of part spirit guide and part wink-wink commentator.
The chorus of children, some in fake beards – the show was originally conceived to be performed by a school choir – capture the show’s selfsatirising attitude just as well as the adults do, at one point consoling a weeping Joseph with “We’ve read the book, mate, you come out on top”. Only Donovan, who first appeared in Joseph as Joseph himself in 1992, strikes an underwhelming note: his camp but not quite camp enough performance as a rock and roll Pharaoh has a whiff of treading on past glories. But for all its sense of grand West End occasion, Connor’s revival, with its billowing coloured sheets and polystyrene-looking pyramids, winningly retains the bargain basement “We can get away with anything” spirit of a student production at the Edinburgh Fringe, where indeed Joseph appeared in 1972. Furthermore, it gleefully dispenses with any anxieties about dodgy cultural stereotyping – if it wants to dance like an Egyptian, it damn well will. Expectation is high for Cinderella, but it will have to go some distance to be as entertaining as this. Until Sept 5. Tickets: lwtheatres.co.uk