The Rev. Dr Baron Dame Sir Andrew Lloyd Lord Webber BA (Hons) MEng, QC, MD, P.I. and Tim Rice’s
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was originally conceived as a show for schools but gradually grew, until in the 1990s it was finally fully reinvented as a big-budget West End behemoth – so successfully that the same Steven Pimlott production has kept returning to the stage for nearly thirty years. Laurence Connor’s is the first new take on the show since then, although the story – from an otherwise fairly obscure Genesis passage – remains familiar: Jacob has twelve sons, of whom Joseph is the clear favourite and showered with gifts, because Jacob liked Joseph’s mum more than the other sons’ mums. Joseph has the ability to interpret dreams but
not the ability to read a room, so he cheerfully tells his already-alienated brothers that this unequal treatment is just the start, and he’s had a premonition that some day they’ll all fall at his feet.
