Reviews
The following are short extracts from reviews of the London Palladium production which opened on 12 June 1991:
An enchanting blend of pop and pastiche, it is at its best in Pharaoh’s
Story, Close Every Door and Benjamin Calypso. It
refreshingly avoids the pretentious, keeps your toes a-tapping and
ensures that the beguilingly anachronistic lyrics remain ingenuous and
colloquial. The result is a Technicolor dream of a show that is lovely
to look at, delightful to know.
Clive Hirschhorn - Sunday Express
The staging is effectively jokey, a synthetic riot of mechanical camels
and giant sphinx with rolling eyes. The freshness of Tim Rice’s doggerel
is undiminished either by the years or by the thousands of repetitions in
schools and provincial playhouses across the land.
Ben Thompson - Independent on Sunday
You would have to be a complete churl or a sourpuss of the first
magnitude not to enjoy this brilliant revival of the first big musical
hit for the gifted Rice-Lloyd Webber duo. Jason And The Amazing
Psychedelic Musical is a terrific high-energy event. The timing of
Joseph’s return to the West End is exactly right. It certainly deserves
to go, go, go on and on.
Maureen Paton - Daily Express
Its spirit is as eternally youthful as Peter Pan and its staying power
a testimony to the precocious talents who conceived it as a 40-minute
school concert before that had even thought of Jesus Christ Superstar
! For me, the great star of the evening is Miss Linzi Hateley as the
beamingly convivial narrator set against hordes of brightly dressed
children, she paces her performance like a Broadway veteran.
Jack Tinker - Daily Mail
In the Lloyd Webber canon Joseph may rack as a youthful
jeu d’esprit. But, like the dreamcoat itself, it is a show of many
colours in the form of varied musical styles and it has a snap, crackle,
and pop that makes it perennially pleasing.
Michael Billington - Guardian
This is one of the most unashamedly and irresistibly happy events in
town.
John Peter - Sunday Times
Amid the high-tech, high-precision razzmatazz at the Palladium, the
moments you’re most likely to remember are those that amiably ham-up
various musical styles. Nicholas Colicos brings a nice cod twang and
throb to One More Angel In Heaven, with its send-up of those country
and western numbers that amble along like a mule across a prairie.
Johnny Amobi bounces out a calypso that rumly resounds round Pharaoh’s
court. The Middle East meets Montmartre in Those Canaan Days,
an accordion and nostalgia chanson steeped in Gauloise huskiness.
Memphis, Lower Egypt, is hip-jutted aside by Memphis, Tennessee, as
David Easter’s Presley-Pharaoh moodily rocks through Song of the
King.
Peter Kemp - Independent