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Joseph and His Technicolor Dreamcoat - 5th Avenue review
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Somehow the 5th Avenue has managed to reap an incredible success out of an outdated musical, with bland songs about an Old Testament story in a relatively irreligious city.
How did they do it? I'm still pondering that the morning after as I recall some of the highlights of Joseph and His Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Fifth Avenue last night. So far I have penned in superb individual performances, excellently funny writing, hilarious satire aimed at the right places, great singing voices and top of the range comedic acting.
Not to diminish the superb performances put in by the gorgeous and talented Jennifer Paz as the Narrator and Anthony Fedorov as Joseph, there was one scene that threatened to nearly to steal the show and certainly eclipsed anything else.
In one scene, Joseph's brothers bemoan how famine has hit them and reminisce about better times. The song, called Those Canaan Days, is performed by the brothers led by Daniel C Levine as Napthali. Levine plays it in the style of a hilariously overacted French melodrama--Edith Piaf meets Monty Python--and the result is hilarious. They hit every coconut in satirising a genre of theatre and do so with comedic timing, French accents worthy of Monty Python's Holy Grail Castle sketch, good singing voices and un misere de vie as befits their situation in the drama. It's brilliant. Utterly brilliant. Perhaps the funniest thing I have seen at a Seattle theatre in four years.
It's not just French cinema that is used as satirical target practice. The culture of the American South is given its obligatory slap at the 5th Avenue as doo-wop music is cleverly used early on.
The Dusty 45's front man Billy Joe Huels stars as the Elvis-impersonating Pharaoh and, although Huels could work on the clarity of his diction--his words were hard to decipher--his moves and his Elvis accent were top notch.
Perhaps it was just to sing more clearly than Jennifer Paz. The Seattle grown veteran of Miss Saigon appears on the stage first surrounded by children dressed in angel white. At first, a sense of dread swept me that I was about to be subjected to a didactic accurate rendition of the Old Testament story, complete with religious imagery and hero worship, which is enjoyable for some, but just not something I'd do on a spare night. Thoughts of Jesus Christ Superstar came to mind. To an extent, Jennifer played the ruse superbly, giving me no indication of the laughter to come. Playing the part in the style of a host of a children's TV show, Jennifer proved a perfect foil to the comedic shenanigans going on around her and the children. Her voice was crystal clear, her words and notes precise and her presence a very well used mechanism to connect between scenes.
Anthony Fedorov played Joseph in a "Joseph and His Technicolor Dreamcoat" where he was more a tool to be used for the comedy around him, than a participant. He did it very well and allowed a very strong script, and more importantly strong characters including Levine's Naphtali and Huels' Pharoah, to entertain and get the laughs, while not being distracted from his lines and his songs. That's not always easy to do as the straight man in a comedy and Fedorov did it well.
There's one additional beauty to this work. The jokes that are grown up, kids won't get; but they'll never feel excluded. The stage is colourful, reminding me of the opening sequences of the Partridge Family. The original work was written by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1968, a year also included in the satire.
This show is safe to take children, Christians, atheists and your grandma to. You really don't have an excuse not to see it, Seattle!
Dusty 45s at Bumbershoot
Napthali (Daniel C. Levine, center) and his brothers in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Photo: Chris Bennion
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