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Joseph and the amazing technicolour dreamcoat

Not just any old dream

JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOUR DREAMCOAT
Adelphi Theatre, Strand, London

The children enter and settle on the floor around their teacher’s wooden chapel chair. She comes in and takes her seat opening her Bible somewhere near the beginning. The children gaze at her in rapt attention as she begins her story. Your Sunday school class? You wish! No, this is the opening of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, Joseph.

And what a story it is! A young man is loved by his father, but despised and rejected by his brothers. (The malicious glee of the brothers at Joseph’s demise and their two-facedness to their grieving parent is brilliantly expressed in the ironic ‘One more angel in heaven’.) From there our hero is dragged off to Egypt by a remote-controlled comedy camel and Ishmaelites, to Potiphar’s house, where the evil and callous seduction attempt by Potiphar’s wife is as nasty as it ought to be. God’s man meets and resists the temptation of the world and is banged up for his trouble. There Joseph sings a song of hope: ‘Close every door…. Children of Israel are never alone…. I have been promised…’

The second half is slightly more surreal as we witness the splendour of Egypt under the reign of Elvis the King/aka Pharoah. This is contrasted with the starvation in Canaan and followed by some fine grovelling on the part of the brothers and a musically explicit recollection that this is a precise fulfilment of the younger Joseph’s dreams. So, God’s revelation is true. The postmodern anthem ‘Any Dream will do’ (great tune, rubbish words) is, bizarrely, a denial of all that the story has taught us. Any dream will not do, as Pharoah’s baker would tell you, if he still had his head, but God’s purposes and promises never fail.

Despite its flaws and glaring omissions (biblically speaking) all this is immensely cheering to a believer. The musical has a solid and worthwhile story, slightly skewed, of course, but presented with witty rhyming, non-stop action, energetic dancing and irresistible tunes. Not exactly a Sunday school lesson (although it challenges us to make our storytelling more exciting), but for a family holiday treat the Bible beats tacky pantomime any day of the week or time of the year.

Ann Benton