Bowled over

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 high-kicking Jewish shepherds, no — by the material. Talk about genius from nowhere. The script originated as a 20-minute end-of-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.