‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’ sings to the rafters at the Marriott Theatre
“Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” the show blowing bubbles of family-friendly joy at the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire, has been there my entire reviewing life. Chicago first embraced this Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice irreverent Biblical creation with the help of some 500 performances from a bare-chested Donny Osmond back in the mid-1990s, which, some readers will be shocked to hear, is now 30 years ago.
Feels like yesterday to me (“I close my eyes, pull back the curtain …”).
Any show that was so successful for so long in downtown Chicago that an Osmond was persuaded to move himself and his family to Wilmette is a piece of theater that deserves respect. One of our best family stories from that “Jospeh” era came when Osmond called our house just as my wife, who had stared for years at his picture on her bedroom wall, happened to be taking out the trash. She came back in just as he clicked off (I was out, too). She listened to the voicemail with no return number and fell to her knees in sorrow at the missed opportunity. “Joseph” giveth and “Joseph” can taketh away.
Director Amber Mak’s new production is so popular, and the theater so heavily sold, that your humble correspondent ended up, for the first time in decades of reviewing there, on the front row. I suspect the actors, to the limited extent they cared, would have preferred otherwise. Since this cast is packed with wry veterans of our musical theater scene like Lorenzo Rush Jr. (offering up a tasty Pharaoh cocktail that is one part Elvis, one part Prince and 900 parts himself), George Keating (at his Old Testament best), Lillian Castillo (in the chorus, for heaven’s sake) and Leah Morrow (workin’ it as one of the bros), I felt like I got sent the occasional “yes, here I am doing ‘Joseph'” look.
And proudly so, folks. Proudly so. Look at the palpable pleasure you are bringing to grandparents and grandkids and any and all lovers of bouncy melodies, lyrical travesties and short running times, with an intermission.
Mak reinvents no wheels in this venerable theater-in-the-round. But she does fashion a very sweet frame wherein we first meet a young girl (the great Avelyn Lena Choi, who is racking up more Chicago theater credits than Donny) and her dad (Devin DeSantis, all stellar vocals, wavy hair and just a smidgeon of self parody). He and the girl’s mom, played by Kaitlyn Davis (Carole King in Marriott’s superb “Beautiful”) morph into Joe and the narrator respectively as the show unspools in her playroom. It’s fun to see the show through a child’s eyes (as many kids in the audience clearly appreciated) and Mak shrewdly mitigates the show’s more, ahem, problematic aspects when it comes to cultural depictions, not that any of it made actual sense at any point in the show’s history.
But I come to praise “Joseph” and what a well-toned, heartfelt production like this one does for a tired, stressed-out audience, not to bury it.
More influential than you think, this show had the first-ever megamix, the most tuneful and easily digested recitatives in Broadway history, lots of self-awareness (“We’ve read the book and you come out on top”) long before it became fashionable, and a lift-off-the-roof power balled in “Close Every Door to Me,” written waaaay before “Defying Gravity” or even “Memory.”
De Santis knows it’s a gift and he leans in. He sounded great from the front row.
