Dream or nightmare? ... Lee Mead as Joseph. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
After seeing off thousands of other starry-eyed hopefuls in the BBC's nauseating Saturday-nighter Any Dream Will Do - and warming up with a slot at the only mildly less awful Concert for Diana - Lee Mead has braved the stage for the first night of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Joseph. The reviews are in and they're a pretty mixed bunch in comparison to the adoration enjoyed by Connie Fisher, who was almost universally deemed the solution to "a problem like Maria" for The Sound of Music.
A technical hitch on the night led to an embarrassing momentary absence of Ishmaelites - although not every critic seemed to notice. For the Guardian's Michael Billington, it was just part of a bizarre evening - even by the "self-parodic standards of a West End first night". Billington found everything either "cutesy, camp or calculated" and missed the "heart and soul" of the 1991 Palladium production in which Jason Donovan donned the coat of many colours. For Billington, this new Joseph is so overblown it swamps the songs: "Somewhere inside this big, fat show there is a small, delightful musical struggling to get out."
Billington found Mead a decent Joseph -"fresh-faced and chubby-thighed" (ouch) - but over at The Telegraph, Charles Spencer gushed that he "looks good in a loincloth" (Mead not Billington). Citing the abundance of musicals in the West End, the built-in BBC publicity juggernaut and the fact that it's not exactly that long since the last production of Joseph, Spencer admitted that "one ought to be sternly disapproving about this revival". Still, Spencer apparently voted for Lee himself and believes that "the former understudy ... proved himself a West End star".
That "former understudy" bit raises an important point - Mead was shadowing the role of Raoul in Phantom of the Opera before the Joseph show. Says Billington: "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". Blogger hobbitlife agrees with Billington: "Lee's done plenty of professional theatre before and in that respect shouldn't have even been considered." It reminds me - and I'm ashamed to remember anything about it - of when Hear'Say held a nationwide search to recruit a replacement for Kym Marsh, then gave the job to someone who'd already troubled the Top 40. That left the kids at CBBC feeling particularly cheated.
Anyway, back to the loincloths ... The Independent's Rhoda Koenig thought Mead had a "tendency to give out towards the end of a line" but also boasted "a way of filling a pleated loincloth that will appeal to all sexes." (All sexes?) Meanwhile, the Daily Mail's Quentin Letts was struck by the way Mead flashed "yards of (hairy, rugger playerish) inside leg" and devoted several sentences to Mead's appearance - his "cascading black curls", "waxed" chest and back, and uncanny resemblance to "a cross between Donny Osmond and Sir Tom Stoppard".
So ... some questions. Have you got a ticket for Joseph? Did you vote for Lee or one of the other wannabe Josephs? Can Mead measure up to Jason Donovan, Phillip Schofield, Stephen Gately or H from Steps? And which show should get the West End treatment next? Personally, I'm with Mark Shenton, who suggests a primetime quest to find the lead for Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking.
