Word: technicolored
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Although the production is competently executed and insipidly entertaining, it is unclear why it is being revived. When Grease arrives on Broadway it will join revivals of Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, and Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Good shows all, but the expense of producing a Broadway production steers investors toward sure bets like those and away from new musicals. This leaves a season that entertains tourists but is artistic junk food...
...could call Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat underproduced. Like Lloyd Webber's Starlight Express, what started life as a sweet little piece for children has been inflated to epic vulgarity. The revival that opened on Broadway last week stars a sphinx somewhat shinier and more purple than the original, plus smaller versions of the pyramids and New York City's Chrysler Building. There's one lively visual joke: after a famine, the sheep Joseph's family tended reappear as skeletons. On the human scale, the show stars Michael Damian's pectoral muscles, which are on all but nonstop display...
...perhaps 1956, when this season's My Fair Lady gave elocution a song and dance? Maybe it's 1955, when this season's Damn Yankees first proved that whatever Lola wants, Lola gets. Perhaps it's as modern as 1968, when this season's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat first displayed the talents of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Or perhaps it's as far back as 1945, when this season's most eagerly awaited musical, Carousel, first revealed heaven on earth. By season's end the year may seem as contemporary as 1972, when the tentatively scheduled Grease first revved...
...show's music and book is that Merlyn is more of a Greatest Hits compilation of Musical Theater than an original production. A lot of the scenes are strikingly reminiscent stagings of scenes from other shows. Merlyn's solo in captivity is straight out of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. When bawdy types convene in a tavern, one expects the Master of the House from Les Miserables to drop in. And, when the ensemble gropes at and pleads suggestively for Merlyn to "Come, come," they might as well be addressing Pippin. What is true for some of the staging...
What is it in this man, in his urgent voice and eager eyes, in the message and the messenger, that overwhelms even those who are predisposed to distrust him? Long ago, Billy Graham gave up the shiny suits and technicolor ties of the brash young evangelist; the silver mane is thinner now, the step may falter a bit, he no longer prowls the stage like a lynx. In his preaching as well, the temperatures of hellfire have been reduced, the volume turned down. Graham knows he needs to save his strength: he is fighting Parkinson's disease, a progressive nervous...