Bowled over
Lloyd Evans Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat Adelphi The Hothouse Lyttelton In Celebration Duke of York's Adorable, sensational Joseph. I was bowled over by this show, not just by the slick vitality of the 60-strong cast, not just by the teasingly satirical hippy-trippy lighting effects, not just by Preeya Kalidas's gloriously stylish Narrator, and not just by the Mel Brooksian chorus-line of highkicking Jewish shepherds, no — by the material. Talk about genius from nowhere. The script originated as a 20-minute endof-term sketch for the pupils of St Paul's in west London. Its charm and its technical brilliance were noticed immediately and the show, once expanded, launched its authors heavenwards. Tim Rice's lyrics are joyously witty. When Joseph declares that Pharaoh's dream foretells years of plenty and years of famine, he adds, 'All these things you saw in your pyjamas/ Were a long-term forecast for your farmers'. The music is as sweet, exuberant and catchy as anything the Beatles ever wrote. And the storytelling is just brilliant. Every short scene carries the plot from one distinct predicament into a new and wholly unexpected one, which brims with further possibilities.
In act two there are a couple of numbers that don't drive the tale forward but these lapses aren't noticeable because the songs themselves are such guileful and enchanting rip-offs of various pop genres. This trick of scattergun pastiche was used by Rice and Lloyd Webber only once again, in Jesus Christ Superstar, and their subsequent collaborations seem distinctly starchy compared with this coltish and playful masterpiece. One warning. I've always loved this show like no other and when I met two twenty-something pals in the interval and suggested that this might well be the best musical production ever mounted they looked at me as if I was mad. Well, I am. About this show. And Lee Mead is a pretty good Joseph, too.
At the Lyttelton there's another very hot ticket, a little-known Pinter play set in a sinister correctional centre. The weird but deftly constructed script switches continually between thriller and farce without ever falling short in either mode. Stephen Moore, as the deranged boss Mr Roote, plays a superbly stuffy martinet steeped in the rituals of bureaucratic routine. He sets up an investigation into two patients who have infringed the centre's rules. One has died. The other, God forgive her, has given birth. 'How did she manage it?' Roote asks his subordinate. 'She had an accomplice.' Written in the late 1950s the play was never performed until 1980. No surprise. Mishandled it could become prolix and cumbersome but Ian Rickson's taut and often hilarious production finds just the right note for all the play's differing registers. On the night I went the show was stopped by spontaneous applause. Paul Ritter's character Lush explains to a worried mother that her son has been relocated for the sake of his health (though we suspect he has been murdered) and his two-minute speech grows into a miraculous example of institutional obfuscation. We couldn't help but laugh and cheer. And I have a feeling I saw a rare thing that night — a neglected work being elevated into that small group of Pinter classics which are constantly revived.
In Celebration, by contrast, never really delivers. The play is set in Yorkshire in 1969 where Tim Healy's bluff blathering patriarch dominates his upwardly mobile family. The script is dense with eeh-bah-eck dialect and its spirit of turgid reminiscence feels dated even for the Sixties. But the posters show the handsome young cast in modern dress, thus disguising the fact that the show consists of 155 minutes of folksy jabber. Hard to know what the audience of German, Aussie and Chinese tourists made of it. In the final half-hour things perk up when angry Anthony (played with great charm and fluency by Paul Hilton) accuses his mum of neglecting him when he was five years old. This modest explosion might have furnished a one-act play but not an attempted state-of-the-nation thesis. Emerging from the theatre I stumbled into an excited mob and half a dozen cops. I thought they'd come to arrest the playwright but I learnt that one of the cast, Orlando Bloom, a wan young thing in need of a good dinner, is a film star from the Tolkien franchise. Clearly the crowd had gathered to console him for his daft decision to accept the very dreariest role — as a depressed writer who keeps bursting into tears — in a play crammed with chatterboxing bores. The show runs till September. Optimistic producers! Watch out for German tourists ordering beers in broad West Riding dialect.
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