I first saw this show in 1972 when it was a modest 40-minute musical playing at Edinburgh festival. Now it is a two-hour spectacle given a ritzy production by Laurence Connor and boasting a starry cast headed by Sheridan Smith, as the Narrator, and Jason Donovan, as Pharaoh. The good news is that the show retains its charm and features a sensational debut in the title role by Jac Yarrow, who has just graduated from Arts Educational yet gives the impression he was born on the Palladium stage.
What keeps the show alive is its delight in simple storytelling, the bounce of Tim Rice’s lyrics and the merry eclecticism of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score, which embraces country and western, calypso, French chanson and Elvis-style rock. Rice and Lloyd Webber come across as two young men who might be described as les enfants du parody and who enjoy testing the range of their talents. There is wit in Lloyd Webber’s willingness to try different styles and in Rice’s verbal dexterity, which allows Joseph to explain Pharaoh’s dreams as: “All those things you saw in your pyjamas / Are a long-range forecast for your farmers.”
It helps to have Smith as a hyperactive narrator who charges around in a blue tracksuit like a jaunty gym teacher, constantly winking at the audience to suggest it’s all a bit of a lark. Donovan, a former Joseph, graduates to a gold-plated Pharaoh who might have stepped out of a Cecil B DeMille movie and who sings like the King. But the discovery is Yarrow, who plays Joseph as a naive dreamer slowly waking up to his prophetic gifts. He stops the show with his rendering of Close Every Door, which he delivers with rising anguish.
Occasionally John Cameron’s orchestrations drown the lyrics and one or two ideas, such as guitar-wielding statues, prove there is no lack of corn in Egypt. But this is an ebullient production and, seeing Rice and Lloyd Webber reunited on stage at the curtain call, it is was good to be reminded of their show’s cheerful genesis.
At the London Palladium until 8 September
