Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
By Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice
Directed by Mark Huffman
Starring David Coalter, Patte DePova, Andrew Meidenbauer
Garden Theatre, Winter Garden FL</strong>
It’s the Garden Theatre’s first self-production, and they sure started with a bang. Here’s everything a community theatre can hope for – a huge cast, great costumes, skillful lighting, and a family friendly script that sells right into their local market. OK, the sound was mud and the smoke effects beyond biblical, but all in all this razzle-dazzle was a crowd pleaser and huge success. “Joseph” was Webbers follow on to the success of “Jesus Christ Superstar” and was part of a flowering of post-hippie era religious musicals. The story hews very closely to the Biblical version, but has better songs and elaborate dance numbers. For those of you who skipped Sunday school, the story goes like this:
Elderly Jacob (Lanny Reddick) has 12 boys by wives Rachel and Leah and their assorted handmaidens. Joseph (Coalter) is his favorite, and while the older boys worked the flocks and did the dirty work, Joseph hung out and kept his high fashion coat of many colors clean. I suspect he was a bit of an ass, but that’s not enough justification for his brothers to ship him off to the slave markets of Cairo. They tell Jacob a story about Joseph being bravely eaten by a lion, and the old man falls for it. As a slave, Joseph had a decent career until he caught the horny eye of Potiphar’s wife (Katie Pindar Brown). When her pass at him was rejected, she had him tossed in jail where his ability to interpret dreams won him an audience with the Pharaoh (Meidenbauer). By predicting the commodities market, Joseph became the finance minister of Egypt and when his brothers came to beg for food, he messed with their heads, but never sought the revenge he could easily have taken. .
There’s catchy music here, and any historical principal fall to a good song or jest. Joseph impressed me; his big number “Any Dream Will Do” was nearly moving. The big production number “Potiphar” was a hoot with his wife and servants in sequins and looking like they had just fled a P.G. Wodehouse house party. In the second act, the surreal “Those Canaan Days” only lacked a bottle of absinthe to complete the transformation of the Levant in to a Montmartre crash pad. Less successful was the ambitious “One More Angle in Heaven” with its Oklahoma hoe-down dance number. It got the entire 48 member cast on stage, but the boot stomping was loud enough to drown out the singing.
There were some audio problems, particularly in the first act. The Narrator (DePova) was often muddy and too loud, and while individual numbers and solos sounded fine, the ensemble numbers were poorly mixed and indistinct. I retreated to the last row for the second act, and from here I got a much better appreciation of the lighting (Eric Furbish) and Set design (Paul Bedford). They turned down the smoke in the second act, and now the fumes highlighted the set rather than obscured it.
As a story, this one is weak even by Andrew Lloyd Webber standards. There is no clear protagonist here – Joseph never rails against his fate, but seems to accept whatever happens to him. He never gets a decent “I want song” but is stuck in the “I am” mode. There’s no tension or uncertainly in his role, and his actions are only a scaffold to hang songs on. These are good songs, and the hanging is first class, but the results are a great review and not a moving story with someone to cheer for. Perhaps that explains the enduring quality of this show – you never feel uncomfortable for anyone on stage, because the author never lets them become uncomfortable.
For a complete listing of events at The Garden Theatre in Winter garden, please visit http://wgtheater.org
