Picture: Roy Tan
The Prince of Egypt continues at the Dominion Theatre, London until 31 October 2020.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
The Bible has been a great source of material for Stephen Schwartz with Godspell and Children of Eden and he goes for the Exodus once again with The Prince of Egypt, a children’s favourite as an award-winning 1998 animated movie now a full-blown stage musical.
By writing ten new songs for it, Schwartz has expanded the story of step-brothers Moses and Ramses, one who leads the Hebrews away at the parting of the Red Sea, the other who becomes Pharaoh of heathen Egypt, into a two and three quarter hour epic with a dynamic cast of 37 filling the huge Dominion stage.
If you want explosive dancing, clever magic tricks, great costumes, brilliant use of video backdrop, stunning special effects and faultless voices, particularly those of Luke Brady as Moses and Alexia Khadime as his sister Miriam, then Prince of Egypt is where you want to be.
But, spectacular though it is, it failed to move me and none of the new numbers approach the instant appeal of ‘When You Believe’, the Whitney Houston-Mariah Carey duet which won Schwartz a Best Original Song Oscar.
Shakespearean actor Brady’s rich voice elevates his big numbers ‘Footprints on the Sand’ and ‘For The Rest of My Life’ and there is much to like about Liam Tamne’s Ramses and Christine Allado’s Tzipporah, the wife of Moses.
Khadime’s purity of tone and Allado’s pitch-perfect clarity are a joy on ‘When You Believe’ while other vocal highlights came from those grand old campaigners Gary Wilmot and Adam Pearce.
Wilmot, as Jethro the high priest of the Midianites, makes the most of his solo ‘Through Heaven’s Eyes’, the menacing Pearce has more to do as Pharaoh’s adviser Hotep. He is in great voice on ‘The Laws of the Gods’ and in the ensemble number ‘The Plagues’.
The groupings and tableaux of the large cast, the work of choreographer Sean Cheesman, are ravishing to look at, the wild and wonderful ensemble throwing themselves about with electrifying abandon.
Joe Dixon (excellent as Seti, father of Ramses) and Debbie Kurup (Tuya, Ramses’ mother and foster-mother to Moses) have smaller roles but make the most of them and while Tanisha Spring, as Ramses’ wife Nefertari, is awkward and hard to hear in her early scenes, she improves as the show moves on and does full justice to ‘Heartless’.
Ann Hould-Ward rates a namecheck for her costumes as does Kevin Depinet for clever stage design, minimalist though it is, making full use of portable “stone” boxes.
A 15-strong orchestra under MD Dave Rose has a ball with the 22 numbers, three of them, ‘Deliver Us’, ‘Faster’ and ‘Through Heaven’s Eyes’, reprised, but it is doubtful whether Schwartz has penned anything new to match the pop classic quality of ‘Defying Gravity’, his biggest hit from Wicked, a show which has been playing to full houses in London since 2006 and shows little sign of wanting to leave.
Whether he can remotely repeat that success with The Prince of Egypt without the benefit of a huge star to attract the tourists is another matter. But it won’t be for the want of trying in this lush, energetic production, stylishly directed by Schwartz’s son Scott.
And without recourse to bad language or four-letter words, it’s safe to take children to. Long as it was, it retained the full attention of the eight-year-old girl sitting two away from me to the very end who thought it was “awesome”.
Jeremy Chapman
Tickets for The Prince Of Egypt are available HERE.
View an exclusive gallery of images from The Prince Of Egypt HERE.
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