Classicalite reported last week that the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is to be turned into an (Osmond-less) animated film. This won't be the first before-the-cameras version of the popular show. In 1999 Donny Osmond, Joan Collins, Richard Attenborough and Maria Freidman starred in a small-screen treatment.
It is perhaps a surprise that Joseph will be the first of Lloyd Webber's musicals to be animated. He has spoken at various times of a desire to have an animated Starlight Express. But both are children's shows, so animation would seem to be a natural. And animation would, of course, allow for the epic scope of Joseph's Egypt.
The musical started in a school--Lloyd Webber and his lyricist Rice had just abruptly left university themselves to produce the show. But it was the only kids' show the pair wrote together. Evita followed it, very much an adults-only musical, and child-friendly Cats came about post-Rice (indeed, in many ways it solved the composer's lyricist problem at the time as its real lyricist, T.S. Elliot, was long dead).
CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING
