Evangelicals Now
<< July 2007 >>

Monthly arts column

A look at the BBC's Any dream will do

'We all dream a lot, some are lucky, some are not'

Oscar Hammerstein once said, ‘If you don’t have a dream, how are you going to make your dream come true?’

Andrew Lloyd Webber owes a great deal to Rogers and Hammerstein for the success that he has enjoyed in musical theatre.

Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was where he started. It was originally a short piece that he and Tim Rice wrote in 1968 for a school performance while they were in their early 20s. Over the years, the musical was expanded until 1991 when the London Palladium saw Jason Donovan play Joseph in a production that was seen by two million people over the course of two-and-a-half years and grossed over £47 million.

The winner

Having had his dreams come true, and realising that more than one dream came true over the course of the Maria phenomenon, Lord Webber has set out to make it happen for one lucky Joseph. By the time you read this, the results will be out and it will probably be Lee whose dreams have come true, although the next six months may well contain some hard-work nightmares too. The pressure on Connie to be on stage in The Sound of Music was such that she had to take a month’s rest in March of this year because of strained vocal muscles — the result of singing on through a cold when she really should have let the understudy go on instead.

Inversely proportional

We love being cynical about dreamers. There are those X factor contestants, for example, demonstrating that the ability to dream must be inversely proportional to the talent available to achieve that dream. Then there are those over-confident Big Brother 2007 contestants (I am trying desperately hard not to watch it, I promise) who think too highly of themselves and get booed on the catwalks as they enter the house as a result.

It’s not surprising that Joseph got a bad press when he talked about his dreams. Our culture would have done the same. He just wants to be a celebrity, the 3.00 am girls in The Mirror would have said. Anyone setting themselves up that high deserves to get knocked down. To be great, you need to work at it. Or, you need God to be at work behind the scenes through the most unlikely of situations.

Out of the daily grind

We are, of course, encouraged to follow our dreams and to work hard in order to achieve them. It helps society when we have some end point that we can work towards so that we are economically and socially useful. It lifts us out of our daily reality with its limitations and urges us to solve problems and create opportunities and aim for something better. It also appeals to our pride and our selfish ambition, not to mention our vanity, when we consider that our own glorification is something that we can afford to spend lots of time, effort and money on. The wannabe Josephs on BBC TV’s Any Dream Will Do are being hailed as wonderful and successful and yet their dreams mean so little when compared to the ones that God gave to Joseph.

God’s purposes

At the end of Jacob’s life, Joseph, said to his brothers; ‘It was not you who sent me here but God. He has made me a father to Pharaoh and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt’.

God was working his purposes out through the life of this unlikely, spoilt 17-year-old in order to fulfil big promises made to Abraham. Joseph’s dreams were designed to pave the way for the creation of the nation of Israel. Without his dreams and without God’s sovereign guidance, he would not have arrived in Egypt, he would not have risen to power and he would not have been able to provide food for his family in a terrible time of famine. Through all of these events, God was working.

Just having ‘any’ dream will not do. Thankfully the Bible is not about ‘luck’. Joseph’s God-given dreams provided a people through whom ran a lineage of promise that ended very purposefully in God’s King, Jesus. When we dream in line with what God has promised, we will know what it is like to have the most fantastic dream ever come marvellously true.

Eleanor Margesson