The man who put a new spin on Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

There’s a phrase that director Laurence Connor always associates with Andrew Lloyd Webber: “The audience hears what it sees.”

Truth is, it was American theatre’s giant Hal Prince who passed on the wisdom to the composer, but it had such an impression that he refers to it frequently. “Andrew holds onto this very closely,” Connor says.

Director Laurence Connor describes the new version of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat as “being shot out of a cannon of fun”

“While you can write the most beautiful song, if you don’t get the narrative or the drama right, the song will fall flat. It’s always a marriage between music and vision. That’s why Andrew likes to work closely with the director, sometimes more than the lyricist or writer.”

Little wonder then that Connor and Lloyd Webber have developed a close working relationship over the past 11 years. It was all sparked by Connor’s work on the lavish 25th anniversary production of The Phantom of the Opera. London’s Royal Albert Hall was transformed into a proscenium arch theatre, from a vast concert hall, to produce a fully staged version of the musical. The last of the three performances was relayed live to cinemas around the world.

“[Lloyd Webber] called me the next day to ask if I wanted to work with him on Jesus Christ Superstar,” Connor says.

“He’d been approached to do arena styles of his shows in the past but didn’t really know if he wanted to get involved. When he saw what we did with Phantom, he could see how an arena show could work and the director who could do it.

A scene from the 2016 production of School Of Rock, directed by Laurence Connor with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, at New London Theatre. Credit: Tristram Kenton

“It sparked a flame in him at that moment and, from that, it opened a conversation about The School of Rock [also directed by Connor] and we became friends.″⁣

Various collaborations ensued, while Connor also pursued his own stellar projects including tours of Miss Saigon, Les Miserables and Chess for the English National Opera.

Most recently, he directed Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella on the West End post-lockdown, perhaps before it was quite ready. Now the production is being reworked and renamed after its first song, Bad Cinderella, to open next year on Broadway.

But before Cinderella, there was Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat. When a new version was called for, Lloyd Webber again enlisted the help of Connor. The result was two triumphant seasons at The London Palladium in 2021, and it’s about to open in Melbourne for the first staging of the reimagined production outside of the UK.

Rehearsals for the Melbourne production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat are under way. In the centre is Paulini, who stars as The Narrator.

“I had the idea for it when I saw my children doing it in their school and I really enjoyed the energy,” Connor says.

“There was the bored kid who had to play the donkey and all their faces showed they weren’t completely into it and they were feeling a bit stupid. It reminded me that the show was written for schools originally and I was talking to Andrew, saying I loved the idea of children performing in it. In every production, they were on the sidelines, singing in the chorus, but I thought if we could make the narrator more charismatic, the children could become characters within the piece,” he reflects.

“That way, the story opened up through the eyes of the children and all the adult players became toys to play with, apart from the narrator who became front and centre.”

There’s also much more dance in this production and he describes it as “being shot out of a cannon of fun” for the audience.

“It’s fun, bright, escapist and will help everyone forget their troubles for 1½ hours where you can just laugh, cry and enjoy yourselves, leaving the theatre feeling glad to be alive,” he says.

There’s talk of the show going to Broadway which is still in pandemic recovery but its light-hearted, cohesiveness may be just what’s needed.

This cohesion is, in many ways, one of Lloyd Webber’s greatest gifts, according to Connor. “He has a gift for a melody like few others. They just pour out of him. You can be talking to him when he walks to a piano and bangs out a melody, but it’s that he also understands the construction and order of a musical, knowing when the audience will feel high, sad or be laughing. It’s very clever to know how to insert a song. He’s a genius.”

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is on at the Regent Theatre, Melbourne, from November 13 to January 2023.

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