Unimpressive: The Prince of Egypt reviewed

The Prince of Egypt is a musical adapted from a 1998 Dreamworks cartoon based on the Book of Exodus. So the original writer is God. The show opens with a troupe of fit young athletes working on Pharaoh’s latest tomb. And they look like the best-fed slaves in history. A meat-rich diet and round-the-clock access to a gym and a sauna must have been written into their contracts. The tanned abs of the male slaves ripple and gleam. The lithe females are bendier than hosepipes. Presumably these cartwheeling ballerinas are able to limber up in an air-conditioned dance studio before each shift. The only drawback is lugging blocks of stone up and down half-finished pyramids but these exertions barely interrupt their main task: singing and dancing about their pitiful lot.

A newborn member of their tribe, Moses (meaning ‘Deliverance’), is discovered floating downstream in a picnic hamper. Pharaoh’s wife adopts the lucky foundling and raises him alongside her son Ramses. The script, which Philip LaZebnik has adapted from God’s first draft, doesn’t speculate on Moses’s peculiar upbringing. Freud thought the story hinted at an adulterous pregnancy.

Ramses and Moses grow up in a palace whose stylings honour the glories of the 1970s. Male courtiers wear cricketing whites and hip-length judo tunics. Pharaoh’s kingly rank is indicated by a pair of chunky epaulettes whose gold tassels are longer than the ears of an Afghan hound. The in-house baddie, Hotep, sports a billowing kaftan that might have sheathed the amplitude of Demis Roussos.

The plot moves with predictable stateliness. Pharaoh dies, Ramses inherits, war breaks out, Moses is exiled. In the desert he’s welcomed by the nomadic Midianites.