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?

Michael Billington geeft slechts ** in The Guardian en is niet erg onder de indruk van Lee Mead. Tot nu toe ziet het er naar uit dat de critici een stuk enthousiaster waren over de “ontdekking” van Connie Fisher.

Even by the self-parodic standards of a West End first night, this was a pretty bizarre occasion. The losers of TV’s Any Dream Will Do competition were seated together like Joseph’s envious brethren. Predatory camera crews roamed the aisles in the interval seeking soundbites. A technical hitch even led to the curtain being lowered for five minutes, meaning that we never actually saw Joseph being sold into slavery, thanks to a distinct lack of Ishamaelites. But everything about the occasion seemed disproportionate to the show itself.

That is my main charge against this recreation of the late Steven Pimlott’s 1991 Palladium production. Admittedly that was on a large scale but it had a heart and soul whereas everything about this revival seems either cutesy, camp or calculated. A classic example is Pharaoh’s big Elvis-style number which is delivered by Dean Collinson with so much exaggerated hip swivelling, finger pointing and head tossing as to lose its original wit. It also doesn’t help that a number which is to meant to advance the plot is rendered incomprehensible by over-amplification.

Somewhere inside this big, fat show there is a small, delightful musical struggling to get out. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score shows his undoubted gift for pastiche, embracing, as it does, country and western and Caribbean calypso. Tim Rice’s lyrics are also crisp, jaunty and clever. I still laugh, even after all these years, at Joseph’s advice to the dreaming Pharaoh: “All those things you saw in your pyjamas, Are a long-range forecast to your farmers.” Stripped to its essentials, the show has the innocent exuberance of youth and shows how much Lloyd Webber’s innate romanticism benefited from Rice’s verbal cheek.

In this version everything is covered with the synthetic gloss of show business. Lee Mead, fresh-faced and chubby-thighed in his white loin cloth, is a perfectly decent Joseph; but you feel it didn’t need the ludicrous rigmarole of a TV reality show to discover him since he’d already played Pharaoh in the West End. He also misses the faint element of self-satisfaction in Joseph’s character just as Preeya Kalidas’s leggy Narrator lacks the necessary vocal crispness.

It is a measure of how poorly the story is told that the programme is forced to provide a plot synopsis. What you get, in place of narrative drive, are production effects: a flock of technicolor sheep and a Pharaonic fruit machine that dispenses corn cobs. Even the children are largely used as decoration. A musical which once possessed its own buoyancy has been turned into a piece of gaudy, chocolate-box commercialism.

**** van Lloyd Webber biograaf Michael Coveney voor whatsonstage.com!

Half-way through the first act on the first night, the revolve on the stage got stuck with a lot of coloured sheep on it: “Poor, poor Joseph, whad’ya gonna do?” That was the song at the time, and he couldn’t do anything, poor lamb. We got going, ten minutes later, with a cold lament for his death after being thrown in a snake-pit: “One More Angel in Heaven.”

So the show, not Joseph, died for a bit, then all was fine and dandy. This was the revival of the camp-as-camels 1991 London Palladium version directed by the late lamented Steven Pimlott, brilliantly designed by Mark Thompson, beautifully choreographed by Anthony van Laast, featuring the winner of the Saturday night BBC television contest, Lee Mead from Southend-on-Sea, Essex.

Lee’s just the job. He has footballer thighs, curly black hair and a voice that never gives up even when he misses the melodic line at moments of stress. The Mums will like him and other older women — I took a quick straw poll because I fell amongst them in the interval — find him sexy. Myself, I prefer the camel, but hey, “Any Dream Will Do.”

The show looks so much better in the Adelphi than it did before, balancing the charm of the children’s chorus with the vaudeville excesses among the Pyramids and Egyptian café classes with a firmer control. The scale is more suited to the content, and Lee is less desperate to please than either Jason Donovan or (oh God, he was awful) Phillip Schofield.

How extraordinary the history of this show is, and how moving it was to see Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice take a bow (“I’ll just do a selection of early hits,” said Tim, crooking his leg a la Elvis). The twenty-minute 1968 pop cantata became a 40-minute Young Vic cabaret, then an hour-long West End filler, then this; while remaining all along the favourite all-time Biblical school musical show, eclipsing Herbert Chappell’s The Daniel Jazz and even Benjamin Britten’s Noyes’ Fludde.

It brims with witty musical invention and engagingly literate lyrics, now encompassing pop styles of calypso, country music, Parisian café songs and megamix disco sounds, drawing out a fantastic all-purpose finale from such still fresh items as the irresistible “Any Dream Will Do” and the sinuous “Close Every Door to Me,” which Joseph takes from a prison lament to Verdian heights of political, nationalistic fervour.

Rice and Lloyd Webber have written a lovely new song, “King of My Heart,” for the Elvis-style Pharaoh (Dale Collinson), which stitches together many fine clichés while inventing some surprise melodic leaps. Preeya Kalidas, the star of Bombay Dreams, makes up in style and beauty as the narrator what she lacks in vocal texture, while Stephen Tate, the original Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar, is a notable Potiphar. Stunning costumes all round, too, and not just the coloured coat.

Benedict Nightingale van The Times geeft 4 van 5 sterren

When the time comes for the Great British Public to choose the next Hamlet by TV poll, as the time surely will, it will matter a lot if the viewers opt for a teenage goofball whose claim consists of looking and sounding like an alienated amalgam of the Gallagher brothers. It would also have mattered, though a bit less, if someone as appealing as Connie Fisher hadn’t made it through those cheesy tournaments in order to tootle in the excellent revival of The Sound of Music now at the Palladium.

But what of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, which began life in a London prep school almost 40 years ago? Given the freshness and lack of pretension that marked the show even after its creators revised and extended it for the professionals at the shabby Young Vic, it would almost have been a plus if the whole grisly process had thrown up a larky kid with more enthusiasm than talent.

As it happens, it threw up Lee Mead, who turns out to be both talented and enthusiastic. Not much is asked of him as an actor. He needs to be melancholy when he’s thrown into prison, imperious when he greets the brothers who sold him into slavery, kindly when he forgives them, happy when he’s reconciled with that glum old dodderer, his grieving dad.

All this Mead manages well enough; but what distinguishes him is an attractive singing voice and, coming from beneath hair that owes more to Uncle Esau than father Jacob, lots of affable charisma.

He certainly makes a stronger star than Jason Donovan, whose underpowered, blonde-wigged Joseph in 1991 came across as the Goldilocks of Genesis. The director then was the late Steven Pimlott, and is so now, since this Dreamcoat is a restaging of his production. And I must say, I enjoyed it more last night than I did 16 years ago, even though I’d have liked more rough-theatre simplicity, less ostentatious ado. The chorus of ordinary-looking children helps a lot; but should the Egyptian court, for instance, look quite so much like Las Vegas in one of its over-the-top, let’s-improve-on-Tutankhamun modes?

Still, last night’s audience seemed enchanted. It remained cheerfully unfazed by a glitch in one of the theatre’s revolves that held up the show for a few minutes, and it responded warmly to everything: from Dean Collinson’s narcissistic Elvis lookalike of a Pharoah, to swirls of dancers in clothes that make even Joseph’s dreamcoat look like High Street curtain material, to Mead’s own bare chest when he sits in prison singing the ultra-tuneful Close Every Door. With spoofs of country music, calypso and even Piaf added to the mix, the show is a reminder of how splendidly versatile Lloyd Webber can be.

Nor has Rice written jauntier lyrics. What about the proto-Jungian dream-analyst’s reassuring words to Pharoah, “all those things you saw in your pyjamas are a long-range forecast for your farmers”, followed by the advice to him to “find a man to lead you through the famine with a flair for economic planning”? At that point you forgive the show’s occasional vulgarity and relish what’s still best about it: its youthful exuberance.

Enthousiaste recensie over de voorstelling ook van Lisa Martland voor The Stage. Zij is wel wat minder te spreken over Preeya Kalidas ...

There is a different atmosphere about an opening night when the lead performer has been cast via television. From the cheers that greeted Lee Mead’s first appearance onstage, one could sense the audience willing him to succeed.

The public’s response to the recent BBC series Any Dream Will Do has already resulted in a staggering amount of advance ticket sales, not to mention all the free publicity. Lucky then for the producers that the relatively experienced Mead comes up with the goods and appears relaxed and assured doing so.

While Mead’s acting could benefit from an injection of warmth to temper the arrogance on display, he is in excellent form vocally. His rendition of Close Every Door, encapsulating both tenderness and defiance, is a highlight.
The production itself is dedicated to the late Steven Pimlott who directed the London Palladium staging in 1991. Indeed the show is very much based on Pimlott’s interpretation, revived by associate director Nichola Treherne.

Together with choreographer Anthony Van Laast and designer Mark Thompson, who worked with Pimlott on that hit nineties production, this team creates an entertaining evening full of colour and high energy dance routines.

These ingredients are never more evident than when Egypt meets Las Vegas in Act II, allowing Dean Collinson an opportunity to give his all as a hip-swaying, Presley-inspired Pharaoh. In contrast, Preeya Kalidas disappoints as the Narrator, lacking charisma and despite a good pop voice occasionally straining vocally.

While I gradually tired of the show’s mismatch of scenes and musical spoofs, there is no doubt Rice and Lloyd Webber’s score remains as infectious as ever, especially when performed by a hugely talented ensemble and a charming children’s chorus picked from the Carmel Thomas Youth Singers.

Not long in to opening night and a technical difficulty with the revolve meant an awkward pause in the proceedings. Embarrassing for the producers, but a small hitch in what is likely to be a hit, whatever the critics say.

Mark Shenton op theatre.com:

“Anyone from anywhere can make it/If they get a lucky break,” sings Joseph in the song “Stone the Crows” in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. As performed in the West End’s latest revival of the show at the Adelphi Theatre by Lee Mead, the line has an extra resonance. For, like Connie Fisher in the current London revival of The Sound of Music, Mead is here after winning a reality TV public vote for the part. But unlike Fisher, who though professionally trained had never worked on the West End stage before, Mead has already understudied both Raoul in The Phantom of the Opera in London and Chris in Miss Saigon on tour, as well as appearing as Pharoah in Bill Kenwright’s touring incarnation of Joseph.

Fisher had more to prove, but she also had more opportunity to prove it. By contrast, not much in the way of acting is required in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s earliest through-sung biblical pop oratorio. Though the title character makes a fabled journey from family outcast, sold into slavery by his 11 jealous brothers, to dream interpreter to the ruler of Egypt, there is not much in the way of dramatic progression for the actor to chart, either. Instead, Joseph essentially has to look pretty and sing sweetly. On both counts, this Joseph turns out to be appropriately dreamy. With his lean, buffed-up torso and an unruly mop of dark curly hair that makes it look as if he’s been plugged into an electrical socket, he’s picture-perfect. And with a resonant voice that’s reminiscent of a young Michael Ball, he’s pitch-perfect, too. He may have somehow missed the boy band boat, but he’s a pop poppet with a bright, instantly engaging stage personality.

That, of course, is what the show that launched Lloyd Webber and Rice’s collaboration has in spades, too. Originally conceived for a 15-minute end-of-term school concert (premiered at Colet Court School in West London in 1968), Joseph was gradually stretched. First it was a 20 minute-piece and then longer, mainly thanks to reprises and the addition of an interval, as it found a professional stage life via runs at the Edinburgh fringe, London’s Roundhouse and repeated U.K. tours and occasional West End runs. It has become one of the most iconic and beloved of all British stage musicals mainly thanks to its place in the schools and amateur repertoire, which has embedded the score into the national DNA.

It’s a show that has long provided the earliest introduction to musical theatre for many kids. And if Lloyd Webber and Rice, together and separately, went onto much bigger (and better) things, including the Adelphi’s last tenant, the short-lived revival of Evita, nothing they have ever done has been fresher or funnier that this. But can something so slight, bright, brisk and breezy survive transposition into the kind of mega-musical that Lloyd Webber would come to pioneer?

The late Steven Pimlott sought to provide an answer when he directed a London Palladium revival in 1991. It was conceived as a star vehicle for Jason Donovan, then at the height of his pop fame. Now Pimlott’s production has been pressed back into service, both as a memorial to him and as a star-making vehicle for Lloyd Webber’s latest theatrical marketing wheeze that has always put him, like Joseph himself, ahead of his time.

Truth to tell, some of the show’s jaunty charm is drowned in the lavish parade of Mark Thompson’s sets and props that strenuously introduce some jokes of their own, like multi-coloured sheep, talking camels and Egyptian landmarks that include the Sphinx and the London Eye. And then there’s the mega-mix finale, which reprises (yet again) some of the songs as all-singing, all-dancing karaoke. But the unbridled joy and naive delights of the score cannot be suppressed, and–as led by an irrepressibly chirpy (if rather too glamorous) narrator from Preeya Kalidas–sha la la Joseph–it’ll do just fine.

*** van Nicholas De Jongh in The Evening Standard:

For those of us, aged 10 and over, who do not take musicals too seriously, this earliest of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s shows, still does the comic-satirical business with amusing gusto. It offers a seductive blend of camp, kitsch, and cool mockery of a few Old Testament dreamers and tough-boys, not to mention the sound of Lloyd Webber in first romantic and triumphal form.

This gawdy, hand-clapping, seductive revival, based upon the popular 1991 production by Steven Pimlott who died in February, jubilantly keeps a satirical tongue in its cheek as it unfolds on a stage that does not need to bother with multi-million-pound, scenic sensations.

The Bible is cut down to very human proportions, with a kids’ choir in noisy attendance. Stephen Tate’s heavily bearded Jacob sits in an ornate deckchair. A few sheep, who pass across the stage, are of the made-in-the-workshop sort, while a belching camel turns out to be similarly man-made.

Designer Mark Thompson’s set resembles two tilted gold-framed rectangles, into whose space burst a monocled Potiphar with a campish collection of brilliantined friends in white and Dean Collinson’s ardent Pharaoh, a spooky premonition of what Elvis Presley would sound like in his plumper, middle-age as he belts out King Of My Heart.

The final image - of Lee Mead’s redeemed Joseph elevated high above the stage on a tiny, personal platform - might almost be sending up the current craze for amazing us with brave, new theatrical technology, if he were not, perhaps, joyfully ascending to heaven.

Mead himself, who emerged as the hero of the BBC series Any Dream Will Do, flaunts quite the smallest ego of any Joseph I have seen. He sports the long, curly hair of a Seventies footballer and a powerful, melodious voice that makes the best of Close Every door, the show’s single, genuinely sad song to Tim Rice’s despairing, masochistic lyrics. Mead delivers it in the cells, to Lloyd Webber’s plangent, heartfelt music, with pathos. Yet his Joseph looms small, faint and insignificant when not singing. His acting lacks energy.

His Joseph does not suffer. The charisma of Phillip Schofield or Jason Donovan, Mead’s most recent predecessors, passes him by. Preeya Kalidas’s Narrator makes her pretty presence felt but the voice sounds shrill.

These limitations do not much reduce the special pleasures of the occasion. For Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat remains at its best lightly sending up the bible story on which it relies.

The music and the staging offers no end of appealing parody. So One More Angel in Heaven, that country and western lament for the Joseph handed over to the Ishmaelites and sung by his load of hypocritical brothers, delightfully spoofs the preachy, moroseness of the musical genre it uses.

Potiphar’s Twenties high society world looks a triumph of crazy, mixed-up taste, with men exposing bare legs and white socks, while Potiphar’s wife (Verity Bentham) plumbs the depths of come-hitherish vulgarity. The Pharaoh’s world evokes with affectionate relish the atmosphere of an ancient cinema epic visited by Elvis Presley.

Nichola Treherne is credited as associate director, but I suspect the show’s co-producer, Bill Kenwright, took a prime hand in the direction, as this evening of delightfully nuanced joie de vivre and spirited jokiness recalls elements of his own production four years ago.

Charles Spencer in The Telegraph:

I suppose one ought to be sternly disapproving about this revival of Joseph. The West End is already too full of musicals, the show only recently ended its last run in London, and the BBC has generously given the enterprise many million pounds worth of free publicity with its talent show Any Dream Will Do.

Yet I have to admit to voting for Lee myself and to experiencing a sugar rush of pure pleasure at last night’s exuberant premiere when I found myself in the same row as the losing contestants on Any Dream Will Do. The generous enthusiasm with which they whooped and applauded Lee at the end was touching to behold.

It was a night of high drama. Half an hour in, proceedings had to be halted when a stage revolve got stuck. Fortunately, it was fixed within minutes, and as Lee was hoisted high into the air on a terrifying piece of machinery to wild ovations during the grand finale, there was no doubt that the former understudy had proved himself a West End star.

What Lee Mead has in spades is charm, crucial in a role that could easily seem unattractively priggish. He also looks good in a loin cloth, and has a powerful and expressive voice, heard to particularly fine effect on the dramatic Close Every Door - as close as this ridiculously effervescent show gets to the serious.

By the end, however his vocals were beginning to sound a touch frayed and he and the management need to take care he doesn’t overstrain his greatest asset like Connie Fisher in The Sound of Music.

Both Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice have gone on to bigger things than Joseph, together and apart, but this early piece, first heard in 1968 as a half-hour entertainment at Colet Court prep school and then expanded over the years, has an irresistible bloom of youth about it.

There is an exhilarating prodigality of memorable tunes, with Lloyd Webber ranging from pure pop to classic rock, and from French chanson to Trinidadian calypso via country and western.

What you hear is a composer delightedly discovering his gift for melody. And Tim Rice, who came up with the improbable idea of turning a Bible story into a musical, is at his witty best, coining couplets Cole Porter might have smiled upon. I especially like Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s Dream: “All these things you saw in your pyjamas/ Are a long range forecast for your farmers.”

Nichola Treherne has revived the late and sorely missed Steven Pimlott’s 1991 Palladium production with terrific brio and the energy level never flags.

With a chorus of cute kiddies dressed in all the colours of the rainbow, dance routines that move from the sexily energetic to the physically daring by Anthony Van Laast, and a stunning turn from Dean Collinson as the Elvis-like Pharaoh, Joseph looks like being a sure-fire hit all over again.