Edinburgh Playhouse
Four stars
“I did it in a loincloth,” declares Donny Osmond as a rock and roll Pharaoh while observing Adam Filipe’s more modestly attired Joseph kicking off this latest tour of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s now fifty-two year old musical. Osmond is clad in a gold coloured kilt as he makes this nod to his own tenure in the show’s title role during an American revival that ran for six years.
Osmond’s prodigal’s return is a rites of passage of sorts in Laurence Connor’s well drilled larger than life production of Rice and Lloyd Webber’s biblically inspired concoction. Felipe has this all to come as Joseph, the precocious dreamer whose brothers sell him into slavery, only for him to network his way out of prison and become Pharaoh’s economic saviour.
Things begin with the Narrator setting the scene by way of a storytelling session with the cast’s junior members before leaping into a kind of cosplay heaven as the child actors don false beards to play assorted brothers and bigwigs. With Christina Bianco sadly unwell on press night, understudy Charley Warburton helms things heroically as the Narrator, stepping in and out of the action like some divine shapeshifting Zelig.
The show’s 57 varieties of pop pastiche make for an epic selection box of ecclesiastically inclined bangers, brought to life on Morgan Large’s maximalist set by way of Joann M. Hunter’s slick choreography. Vintage sounding showtunes, a barn dance hoedown, French chanson and even an energetic cheerleader routine are all in the mix.
If Close Every Door, sung by Felipe, is the first half showstopper, the second finds Osmond’s Egyptian rocker channelling full-on Las Vegas Elvis. With everything played in inverted commas a la Horrible Histories, the Joseph-on-45 style grand finale megamix is a mini variety show in itself. Bible study has never been such fun.
ends
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