By Reese Wang, Design Editor
Sitting down at lunch during the weeks leading up to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’s opening night, I couldn’t escape the snippets of conversation between my two friends, who are in the cast and the stage crew of the musical. With so much chatter, I couldn’t wait to watch the show Saturday night. I was not disappointed.
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat follows the biblical story of Joseph, where Joseph, the 11th of Jacob’s 12 sons, is given a multicolored coat to wear, establishing Joseph’s position as Jacob’s favorite son. The other brothers dislike Joseph for being the favorite and his strange dreams, and decide to sell him into slavery. At his new home, Joseph becomes his master’s favorite, but is thrown into jail when his master thinks he’s sleeping with his wife. In jail, Joseph interprets his cellmates’ dreams, and is summoned to the pharaoh to interpret his too. Joseph foresees Egypt’s future agricultural state, and the pharaoh makes him his second in command. When Joseph’s brothers come to Egypt to beg for food, Joseph tests them, before realizing that his brothers really have changed. The musical ends with Jacob and Joseph’s reunion and a megamix of all of the musical’s numbers.
Senior Emma Krapels narrated the story completely through song. She blew my mind, hitting high notes I didn’t even know existed, consistently throughout almost every scene in the musical. The only talking done in the show was by senior JP Infortuna, aka Elvis Presley the pharaoh, who took a quick break in his dancing to stroll through the audience, crack jokes and choose a wife. Props to the makeup and costume team for making him look so scarily like Elvis.
Every song had a different style, and I laughed when all the brothers showed up onstage wearing berets in a dimly lighted French cafe. It looked so believable, with the red, white and blue lighted French flag, that even with the large Egyptian set in the background, everything seemed French. The brother singing in that song had his microphone turned off, so the entire audience leaned forward and stayed silent to hold onto every word of his song.
The end of the show meant a return of every tune I’ve heard hummed at lunch, and I found myself standing up with the rest of the audience to clap along to the familiar beat. Congratulations to Stoga Theatre’s cast, crew and pit on a great show!
Reese Wang can be reached at [email protected]
Photo courtesy of Mary Robinson
