Rhoda Koenig is in The Independent vrij positief over deze revival, maar iets minder enthousiast over Lee Mead.
Rainbow glow adds the finishing touch to dazzling performances
Has Andrew Lloyd Webber managed, once again, to use a TV talent contest to make an unknown a star? Commercially, yes indeed, going by the hyperactive box office and an audience that reaches beyond the usual patrons of the West End - such as the woman who, entering the theatre behind an actress, asked her date, “Is she in the show?”
It seems less likely that Lee Mead will join the immortals. Lacking in character and with a tendency to give out towards the end of a line, his voice is not the world’s greatest, or even the greatest in the show. That honour belongs to Dean Collinson, whose Elvis-imitating Pharaoh matches the original with every dirty growl, falsetto flutter, and sudden, heart-stopping intimacy.
But Mead more than fulfils the requirements, with a mop of dark curls, a wholesome, sweet manner, and a way of filling a pleated loincloth that will appeal to all sexes. His fresh-faced appeal is accentuated by the presence, as the narrator, of Preeya Kalidas, whose singing is breathy and screechy, and whose cautious steps, on her five-inch heels, replicate, from the ankles down, the picky disdain she exudes from the neck up.
A Joseph virgin, I enjoyed myself far more than I thought possible at a Lloyd Webber show, the first I have seen which could pair the composer’s name with the word “unpretentious”.
Tim Rice’s lyrics for their 1968 collaboration are also more lighthearted than his subsequent work, though the philosophy is sometimes dodgy (“You are what you feel”) and the facts awry - the butler imprisoned with Joseph is called “the Jeeves of his time”. Can the ghost of P G Wodehouse, displeased by this error, have cursed their show about fiction’s most famous valet? The casting of the part was no mistake, though, with Russell Walker doing a male version of Joyce Grenfell.
The real star is Steven Pimlott’s production of 1991. It shows, in this revival, what gold-plated professionalism can do for even this simple story of brotherly disloyalty, dream interpretation, and an ending in which the god of vengeance takes a rare day off.
It’s not only Joseph’s coat that knocks your eyes out - all the sets and costumes glow with rainbow hues and joie de vivre, and are frequently enlived with impudent, ingenious touches, such as the multicoloured sheep whose wool makes the title garment, or the Egyptians dressed as if for a comic skit of the 1920s.
There are witty comments in the staging, too: Louise Madison defies gravity and the normal capabilities of musculature in a spectacular Apache dance: with Middle Eastern machismo her partner, whose role is mainly holding her up, flings her aside at the end, to be ignored, while the male spectators crowd round him in congratulation. With all the fuss about the tastelessness of Kismet, set in a Baghdad that is an earthly paradise, no one seems to have noticed the political relevance of Joseph. Suffering at the hands of his enemies, Joseph sings a stirring ballad about his belief that he will one day come into his kingdom: “For we have this promise - a land of our own.”
Was the loud applause for the singer or the song?