Fifty years ago, in August 1972, a new musical premiered at the Haymarket Ice Rink in Edinburgh as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. Directed by Frank Dunlop of London’s Old Vic, the sung-through musical featured an exciting blend of pop-rock music from a young composer called Andrew Lloyd Webber, and a spiritually-charged Biblically-inspired story crafted by lyricist Tim Rice. At only 35 minutes long, the performance was unusual for a piece of musical theatre, but its catchy tunes caught on and an expanded version of the show transferred to the West End the following year.
The creators of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, as the musical was wordily titled, were astonished by the success of their collaboration, which had grown from a slight 15-minute sketch they wrote for a local London school. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat was to become one of the most popular pieces of modern musical theatre, and a calling card for its creators, who would go on to craft several contemporary musical theatre classics.
On the phone from the book-lined study in his Oxfordshire home, Rice relates the unlikely origin story of their debut success. Rice met Lloyd Webber in the mid 1960s, after an introduction from literary agent Desmond Elliot. Rice was working at EMI records at the time and was trying to write pop songs, but wasn’t having much luck.
While trying to sell the idea for a book to Elliot, he mentioned that he was also writing songs and Elliot said “you have to meet this young composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber. Immediately, I thought, ‘well he’ll have to change his name if wants to make it’, but when we met he banged out a few tunes on the piano in his parents’ flat and it was clear to me he was a great talent. He was obsessed by musical theatre, was determined to be the next Richard Rodgers, the next Lionel Bart. He had been writing his own musicals since he was nine years old.”
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In contrast, Rice admits, “I really knew nothing about theatre. I had hardly ever been to see a musical, but my parents had all the scores and they played them on the record player when I was a kid, so I knew the songbooks, how the songs worked. But really I was more into rock and roll. I wanted to be a pop star, but I hadn’t really got anywhere with that, so when [Lloyd Webber] asked if I would be interested in writing some words for a new show I said I would give it a shot and it worked out well.”
The collaboration, Rice means, not the output. “We wrote that show and, well, nothing happened, but we knew that we worked well together so we kept on going, hoping that something we wrote would be a hit show. We were nowhere near getting there, but we really believed we could achieve it.”
Rice laughs now at how ambitious they were. “We didn’t have any [practical] experience in musical theatre. We had no connections, no money. It was a bit ludicrous really, what we were trying to do.” However, an unlikely commission from Alan Doggett, the music teacher at Colet Court School in Hammersmith, provided an unparalleled opportunity that would come to reap dividends for the duo. Doggett “had taught Andrew’s brother [the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber]. He knew that we were writing and suggested that, while we were waiting to take Broadway by storm, we might consider writing something for his kids to perform. Well that was definitely a bit of a come down in one sense — we were aiming for the West End — and there was no money involved, but we would hear people sing our work, which was something we had never had before, so we decided to do it.”
Rice and Lloyd Webber approached the task in the same way they approached all their work at the time. “We knew the key thing that makes a musical a success is the story and everything must come from that. With Joseph we had a cracking story and that inspired Andrew’s tunes, then I wrote words for those tunes.”
Rice’s approach to writing lyrics was driven by his love of popular music. “I loved rhyming, catchy tunes. Comic songs like Mud, Glorious Mud by Michael Flanders, but also the pop music of the day.” Their imperative as they wrote was “making it fun for us and for people who might be listening, so we ended up saying ‘wouldn’t it be funny if the Pharaoh was like Elvis,’ and Andrew wrote a good Elvis pastiche. And we had a country and western song, a French song. [Joseph] grew like that almost of its own accord. Andrew would write the melody and I would put the words in then.”
Rice says that they wrote it quickly and with great freedom, “because we were not thinking about the staging or the lighting or all the business end of things” that they had to consider when conceiving of projects for the West End. “We just wrote something that we liked, something lighthearted and fun, and it worked.” If he had to boil the formula down to a single phrase, however, he would say: “the plot was king. That is how it has worked for everything that I have done since.”
In 1968, the kids at Colet Court School performed the first version of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, a 15-minute pop cantata, whose success demanded that the pair slowly expand the score to 35 minutes. It was a big hit on the schools circuit and in 1969 was recorded as a concept album in England. The album didn’t sell very well but “it got us attention and good management, and as a result we were able to pursue our musical careers full time.”
At this stage the partners had created a second musical based on the New Testament called Jesus Christ Superstar. Unable to secure funding, they released the score as a concept album too, and the success of the record led to a full-scale production on Broadway in 1971.
The success of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat the following year in Edinburgh — a coincidence of timing and good luck — took Lloyd Webber and Rice by surprise. Consumed by their first Broadway hit, “we had sort of forgotten about it,” Rice explains. “I didn’t even go to the opening.” When the show got rave reviews, “I thought, ‘oh this is our show, we had better go see it’.”
He credits Dunlop with making the subtle changes that transformed it theatrically and made a full production viable. In the original school performances, “there was a narrator and the songs were all sung in unison by a choir. But Frank asked if he could change a few lines — nothing major — but if he could change it a bit so that the lines of [Joseph’s] brothers would be sung by individual singers rather than a choir. So the brothers became — not individuals, really, but more like an 11-headed character. It worked really well and was very funny, and every other production that has happened since has been indebted to Frank’s original staging.”
In the 50 years since the Edinburgh premiere, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat has been performed widely in both amateur and professional circles. A Noel Pearson production toured Ireland for four years in the 1970s, with showband star Tony Kenny in the leading role, while international stars such as Donny Osmond and Jason Donovan led the big touring productions of the 1990s.
However, Rice still remembers the first stars of the show, who helped bring the dreams of two unknown ambitious starry-eyed artists to life. “I have met many of them over the years,” Rice says, “and of course those young people are now old people. Some delightful ageing chap will come up to me and say ‘excuse me, I was in Joseph when I was eight years old’.” The heartening thing for Rice, is that they can bring their children, their grandchildren, and still enjoy the colourful, catchy confection of the staging and the songs: “I think it is true to say about any great show with popular music. If it is good it will appeal to everyone of all generations.”
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat runs at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre from August 9th to August 27th
