“A Run of Crazy Dreams”: The Spectacle of Muddled Orientalism and Hyper-Sexuality in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”

Introduction

In the 1999 direct-to-video film, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, when tasked with interpreting Pharaoh’s (Robert Torti) troublesome dream, a handcuffed Joseph (Donny Osmond) rises from his kneeling position in front of the throne and weaves through glittering background dancers toward the narrator (Maria Friedman) on stage left. Upon reaching her, he flips through a Holy Bible in her hands, presumably for the section in Genesis where he correctly interprets the dream. The book, with its black leather cover and gold lettering, is clearly a full biblical canon containing both the Old and New Testaments. He also flips through pages at least halfway through the book, if not more, meaning the text he is looking at is likely well into the Gospels, an irrelevant book to a character who only appears in Genesis. The gag is on screen, in total, for less than ten seconds and immediately forgotten in favor of Joseph’s subsequent bumbling attempt at the dance routine happening around him. Yet, in regard to how the production situates itself, it is an incredibly telling detail. By having Joseph reference a fully formed biblical canon, the movie nullifies any sense that Joseph possesses the talent of interpretation through the power of God. Any dream interpretation he did up to this point in the film can now be chalked up to cheating. Joseph’s presumed superiority over his brothers, proven at the beginning of the film through the interpretation of one of his own dreams, in which “Your eleven sheaves of corn all turned and bowed to mine,” is now being upset.^[1] This little detail, even in its joking intentions, has completely upended the entire narrative, but it does not seem to recognize or care about its implications. The physical Bible makes no further appearance in the film, and Joseph’s interaction with it is never referenced. Joseph himself seems to immediately forget, as, giving up on his mid-tier dance ability, he goes back to dodging members of the ensemble. This is an inadvertent moment of irony, where a biblical character, arguably the only remotely biblically accurate of any of the movie’s characters, is being tossed around by a mass of sparkly, grinning, perfectly choreographed dancers while he attempts to make it to his next narrative-required plot point.

In eighty minutes of romping around flatly lit soundstages, Joseph is gifted a multicolored coat by Jacob, sold into slavery by his brothers, jailed for accusations of copulating with his master’s wife, and promoted to head of famine prevention by Pharaoh after interpreting dreams. He frames his youngest brother for theft as some sort of revenge against the other brothers; is reunited with his father, who gives him a completely spotless dreamcoat (strange, considering his brothers ripped and blood-soaked the previous one); sings a megamix; and has little to nothing in the way of character development. This loose, exaggerated attitude toward sacred and historical material is foundational to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and has a tendency to devolve through parody into appropriation in the name of spectacle.

In this article, I explore the history of the work in its prefilm entities and how it acquired its defining characteristic as a pastiche musical. In that realm, I delve into how the work wrestled with visually portraying the pastiche in “Benjamin Calypso” and “Song of the King.” I also incorporate the notions of affect and the economy of fun and how they are used to waylay the muddled Orientalism prevalent throughout the movie.

Background and Overview

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat began its life in 1968 as a twenty-minute cantata for the St. Paul’s School boys choir in London when its composers, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, were a mere twenty-three and nineteen years old, respectively.^[2] Over the next thirty years, it would grow from a concise twenty-minute school concert to a seventy-minute Broadway musical to an eighty-minute direct-to-video film. Along the way, the work’s identity was cemented through its use of pastiche, as none of the genre-borrowing numbers appeared on the 1969 concept album.^[3] The concept songs all have a distinctly sixties feel, with nonchalant vocals akin to those of Paul McCartney and the plucky guitar to match. The succeeding 1982 Original Broadway Cast recording makes use of a full Broadway orchestra but lacks the synth and drum elements of the three cast recordings released from 1991–1993, choosing to retain a sixties rock and roll feel. The electronic aspect of the 1990s recordings has remained the standard for subsequent productions.

The movie opens with a frame story, presenting Joseph as a play put on for elementary school students, likely a nod to the production’s origins. The students are all in English school uniforms, situating the story in a Western and, perhaps inadvertently, imperialist context. As revealed in the credit sequence, the tweedily dressed schoolteachers are all the actors performing in the play. This frame story is unique to the 1992 Toronto production of Joseph, in which Donny Osmond debuted as what would become a synonymous role for him.^[4] The Joseph movie follows nearly entirely the theatrical choices of the 1992 production, with only a few cut pieces of dialogue, set, and dance breaks here and there.^[5] The Toronto production made substantial costume and musical changes from the 1982 Broadway production, changes which, in many ways, decreased the overt cultural appropriation.^[6] For example, in the 1982 production, Potiphar’s wife was portrayed as a Japanese “Dragon Lady” in a skimpy two-piece set with cherry blossoms in her hair, whereas the Toronto version overhauled the entire sequence into an homage to 1920s Harold Lloyd movies. The Broadway “Benjamin Calypso” has the brothers donning sombreros, indicating that calypso is being portrayed, incorrectly, as Latin American. This point is somewhat fixed in the Toronto version (i.e., the sombreros were cut). Broadway Joseph also does not have the “Jesus” aesthetic of Toronto Joseph, preferring fashionable 1980s skintight pants and clingy T-shirt to long, wavy brown hair and flowing white robes.^[7] The addition of a frame story and softening of some cultural appropriation reflects the decade of changing sensibilities that passed between the two productions, as well as the growing popularity of Joseph as family-friendly entertainment, often performed in schools, though the latter is met with heavy caveats.

The grounding of Joseph is almost wholly accomplished through a Geertzian approach to symbolism where “material things and practices [are treated] as symbols for meanings and ideas.”^[8] Given its loose adherence to the biblical narrative, the production relies heavily on “outward symbols serving as receptacles of inward religious meanings.”^[9] This is evident in costume choices such as Benjamin’s kippah. He is the only non-Joseph brother who wears one, as the others wear keffiyehs or turbans. To the creators of Joseph, the kippah might represent Benjamin’s youth or perhaps his lower level of culpability in Joseph being sold into slavery. The kippah is also realized as an explicitly religious accessory, unlike the turban, and is therefore able to serve as an indicator that these characters are biblical not just in name but also in presentation. Joseph has distilled the religiosity of these characters down into headwear, as if it alone is able to embody the religion’s “true essence.”^[10] It also utilizes this technique beyond religions, deputizing a beret in “Those Canaan Days” or a cowboy hat in “One More Angel in Heaven” to represent an entire culture. These two hat choices, along with the aforementioned sombreros, were all cut for the movie adaptation, though simply replaced with set decoration. For instance, in “Those Canaan Days,” the brothers lament in a Parisian café while smoking cigarettes, which as an overhead shot reveals, is a three-quarter set dropped in the middle of the desert. This shift from having the characters wear the Orientalism to instead just surrounding them with it keeps the idea there without having a specific object for audiences to point the finger at as being Orientalist. Geertzian symbolism is often met with criticisms of fetishizing material objects and giving them too much unearned authority in transmitting cultural information.^[11] Joseph falls directly into that line of criticism in its reliance on material objects to transmit all necessary information about the culture or religion it is incorporating.

With the loss of its hat-related novelties, the Toronto production, and therefore the 1999 film, chose to incorporate a heavier dose of sensual content. We now return to the caveat, as this was done even as children were added onstage, and Joseph was increasingly being performed in schools. A fixture of every iteration of Joseph is entirely male lead roles, save for the narrator and Potiphar’s wife, though the former only became a female role in 1981, and the latter appears for a mere half a song. The main ensemble, credited only as “Wives,” is entirely female and exists in solely disposable and sexualized capacities.^[12] The exception to the sexualization, though not the disposability, is their brief appearance as Jacob’s wives. Here, they are dressed in modest, floor-length black dresses with their heads and faces covered by veils and masks. In this regard, they reflect Jacob’s respectability and tradition. In contrast, as the scheming brothers’ wives, they lose the masks, and their somber robes are replaced by petticoat-ed, patterned skirts and thick, striped leggings adorned with shockingly red cowboy boots for a high-kicking, skirt-swishing, cartwheeling hoedown dance break. As Potiphar’s wife’s attendants, the women are in sheer bodysuits with rhinestone pasties and fringe panties. The one line never crossed is their hair, which is covered by headdresses or scarves in every scene, preserving their modesty even as they are topless. The “Potiphar” costume is still toned down compared to the 1992 version that lacked the bodysuit and had the women fully topless minus the tasseled pasties. The female ensemble’s final appearance comes as part of Pharaoh’s court, somehow less dressed than during “Potiphar.” In “Song of the King,” the women are clothed in gold net dresses overlaying gold thongs and pasties, and two are dressed as the sexy version of William, the Egyptian faience hippo famously held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.^[13] In the name of equality, Joseph is also given the bare-all treatment to a certain degree. He is fully clothed until his encounter with Potiphar’s wife, who, in her advances, strips him down to a white, artfully draped, loincloth. She grabs at him, caressing his chest and slapping his buttocks, objectively assaultive behavior that is being played for laughs. The suave clarinet runs and '20s art deco theming overwhelms the obvious distress on Joseph’s face. In the 1993 production, you can easily hear the guffaws of the audience as Joseph attempts to forcefully remove her hands from his buttocks. A cutaway from Potiphar’s scene even presents the scene as an orgy of Joseph, Potiphar’s wife, and her attendants, both female and male. Joseph remains in this loincloth for the further duration of the movie, adding only a usekh when he becomes Pharaoh’s second-in-command. It is as if the Canadian production chose to up the sexual nature of the musical to counterbalance the redacted racism in order to hold their audience’s attention. Also, a lovely reminder that the frame story means that children are either onstage or cut to in most of these scenes, meaning they bear witness to all the hypersexualization and objectification.

Muddled Orientalism

Even with the omission of the most glaring examples of appropriation, due to the manner in which the libretto was composed, the music retains the notion of borrowing as a method of making a biblical narrative appealing to a wider audience. Sophia Rose Arjana presents the category of “muddled Orientalism” as describing “careless mixing of images, terms, and tropes from the imagined Orient.”^[14] In her work, Arjana expands Edward Said’s definition of Orientalism to include not just the Middle East but also Africa and East Asia.^[15] However, I expand the term even further to include other parts of the world that Joseph deems “exotic,” such as the American South, the French Apache subculture, the Caribbean, and the late-1960s hippie movement. This is due to their confused “othering” by the musical, regardless of their wildly different relationships to colonialism. Pastiche is often the preferred word critics and artists alike use to describe the music of Joseph, but it also easily lends itself to the storied history of Orientalism in music, both classical and theatrical.^[16] Arjana herself even describes muddled Orientalism as a “pastiche of unrelated, exotic formats.”^[17] There is no easy, or perhaps any, way to understand a relationship between the wildly disparate environments the characters in Joseph flit between that is not a variant of muddled Orientalism. Suspension of disbelief must take on a different dimension when the patriarchs of the twelve tribes of Israel develop American Southern accents for a single musical number and European French accents for another. As a technique, pastiche is foundational to musical theater given that the genre developed out of variety revues and vaudeville, which compiled different musical works into one act. In kinder lights, these compilations evoke a different era, such as the swinging '60s in Hairspray or a German nightclub in Cabaret. Where Joseph departs from this definition is that it is not a “historical musical,” in the sense that it does not attempt to transport the audience into biblical times, the way a show like Cabaret makes the audience feel they are in a dark, dingy nightclub. Joseph does not harken back to a single era at all, rather, it is a hodgepodge of genres that span a long timeline with little regard for how those genres might interact with one another in a narrative. In their novel conception of pastiche, Webber and Rice end up leaning on another foundational tenet of musical theater: Orientalism. Orientalism in music, theater, and musical theater, has existed as long as colonialism. The aforementioned fact of musical theater’s roots in vaudeville means it is inherently tied to minstrelsy. Webber and Rice’s pastiche, which is noted in every review, is received to varying degrees but is never criticized as having issues beyond whether it works to sensationalize or not. One review calls the 1976 Brooklyn Academy of Music production a “paraphrase of a pastiche.”^[18] The same review expresses confusion about whether the musical is attempting a modernization of the Bible, in the way "wretched Godspell" fully set the story in the present or not-so-distant past with non-biblical characters. However, the writer never broaches the question of (1) the implications of these biblical musicals on America’s idea of secularism or (2) if the “paraphrase of a pastiche” is at all veering into cultural appropriation of any kind. The first question appears in scholarly discourse, even if it does not appear in theater reviews. However, the second question is noticeably absent from any existing literature about Joseph, which always focuses on the first question. The handling of the pastiche was clearly noticeable to its creators as evidenced by the massive changes made between the Broadway and Toronto productions. Therefore, it seems nearly unfathomable that critics and scholars have neglected to investigate such an important facet of a squarely mainstream production.

“Benjamin Is Honest as Coconuts”

The most egregious of the musical’s foray into muddled Orientalism is the “Benjamin Calypso” toward the end of act 2.^[19] Upon the brothers’ arrival in Egypt, they are given food by Joseph, whom they do not recognize. While the brothers are occupied with their comically oversized ears of corn, Joseph slips a gold cup into Benjamin’s bag in order to frame him for thievery. The brothers jump to the accused Benjamin’s defense, breaking into “Benjamin Calypso,” an upbeat call-and-response tune inflected with maracas, bongos, lyrics referencing produce, and vaguely Caribbean accents. Pharaoh’s attendants continue their composite pose-dancing from “Song of the King,” but the brothers begin swaying their hips and swishing their arms, almost as if they were planning to hula. As Judah pulls the now Egypt-ified Joseph across the stage, the camera pans horizontally with them, bringing the narrator into frame, who is wearing sunglasses and holding a bright red umbrella-topped cocktail. Neon signs in the shape of various tropical fruits flash in the background, looking rather out of place next to the massive Pharaoh head, and giving the idea of an island resort that caters to American tourists. While the brothers’ background swaying may lend itself somewhat to the genre of calypso, the choreographed portions read more Grease than Caribbean, as if the research ended with the acquisition of a maraca. An important detail of the number is that of the song lead. The brothers’ songs are each led by a different brother. For example, “One More Angel in Heaven” is led by Reuben (Nicolas Colicos), and “Those Canaan Days” has a solo from Simeon (Jeff Blumenkrantz). Reuben and Simeon are the two eldest brothers and therefore the ringleaders, giving some reason to their solos. However, in the 1982 Broadway version, “One More Angel” was led by Levi and “Canaan Days” by Reuben, indicating that these numbers were likely assigned depending on the actor’s specific voice. In the movie, Levi is skipped over in the lineage, and “Benjamin Calypso” is led by Judah (Gerry McIntyre), who, along with Benjamin, is one of only two actors of color in the whole cast. This is almost certainly an intentional choice, especially considering that on Broadway, “Benjamin Calypso” was led by Napthali (Charlie Serrano), also the only cast member of color.^[20] Serrano was Puerto Rican, fitting, as the number was portrayed as Latin American, as previously mentioned.^[21] Calypso rhythms resemble those of the Brazilian samba, hence its association with Latin America, but sombreros are Mexican in origin, meaning they have no defense for their inclusion besides muddled Orientalism. Calypso originated in Trinidad and is an integral part of Carnival celebrations. It has roots in West Africa, and hence the choice for the Black actor to lead the song.^[22] The notion that anything in duple meter accompanied by a shaken percussion instrument can be called “calypso” is an example of muddled Orientalism, where a music that sounds even a little bit “other” to White ears can be used.

The Economy of Fun

Jake Johnson, a musicologist at the University of Oklahoma, refers to musicals as inhabiting a “post-truth worldview,” where current liberal ideologies are projected onto past events, even as the musical theater community remains tethered to tradition.^[23] He asserts that there is a level of anti-intellectualism in the escapism and all-wrapped-up endings of musicals. Joseph does not contain the satirizing of beliefs of The Book of Mormon or the critique of secularism in Bernstein’s Mass, both case studies used by Johnson. Truly, Joseph has little in the way of commentary on religion at all, preferring the bland but inoffensive notion of “If you think it, want it, dream it, then it’s real. You are what you feel.”^[24] This is helped by the fact that the story of Joseph, as told in Genesis, is a straightforward narrative with no direct appearances made by God or His messengers. Therefore, the show is able to more easily make the choice of how much to lean into the religiosity of the source material. Lloyd Webber describes Joseph as “a romp,” saying that he did not intend to make any political statements in his adaptation of a biblical tale. He emphasizes that the moral of the story is “harmless sentiments straight out of the Bible” and was truly just meant to “make children laugh in rehearsals.”^[25]

The “romp” of it all is translatable to affect theory. Donovan O. Schaefer writes that affect theory “thematizes the ways that the world prompts us to move before the interventions of language.”^[26] Although the lyrics are obviously important narratively, the aural component of the different musical styles and visual component of over-the-top costumes, obviously fake wigs, and heavy camera mugging are objectively more effective in terms of transmitting the point of Joseph, which is fun. The joy continues even in what should be darker movements thematically. While imprisoned, Joseph interprets the dreams of two fellow prisoners, a butler and a baker. He tells the butler that he will soon be pardoned by Pharaoh, but the baker will soon be executed by Pharaoh for unknown reasons. A man being confronted with his impending death should pull even a bit of sadness out of the viewer, but the baker is impossible to take seriously in his French chef’s coat, gingham bandanna, and coral blush that appears stamped onto his cheeks. In addition, his testimony was preceded by a visual gag of him being unable to fit through the gaps in the bars of Joseph’s birdcage-like cell and Joseph simply opening the door of the cell to let him in. After Joseph tells the baker of his fate, he dangles hope in front of the poor man, saying “don’t believe in all I said I saw,” and then immediately snatches it away with “it’s just that I have not been wrong before,” at which point the baker faints backward.^[27] This is the doomed man’s final appearance until the credits, as the scene immediately pivots to a full Summer of Love–style group number cheering on Joseph. The silliness is infectious, spreading through the ensemble to a forlorn Joseph, fresh off his big all-hope-is-lost ballad, “Close Every Door,” and lodging itself in the smiles of its audience. The production is selling fun, refusing to linger in despair for longer than it takes for Donny Osmond to sing the compulsory dramatic-whiny-protagonist ballad, which, even then, is overshadowed by his torso.

“Let Me Show You How We Rock and Roll in Egypt”

Pharaoh Elvis, with his distinct timbre and nearly audible hip thrusts, is the only stylistic throughline to have survived every iteration of Joseph. His presentation as “The King of Rock and Roll” is the most accessible of all the homages, especially to American audiences, but his ties to Egypt are few and far between. At the top of act 2, the horde of brightly dressed children ascends the steps to a platform in front of an enormous Pharaoh head statue. Soundtracked by the theme from “Jacob and Sons,” ensemble members dressed as Apis and mimicking composite poses flank the head. The face of Pharaoh rises to reveal a solitary figure standing, with arms crossed over his chest, holding the crook of Osiris and a microphone, rather than the requisite flail. Sharp sideburns peek out of the sides of his nemes, and an usekh compliments a gratuitously bedazzled “P” belt buckle. A zoom out reveals bobby socks and blue suede shoes. Behind him stand the unmistakable Gates of Graceland, with no attempt to Egypt-ify them. Still in the track “Poor, Poor Pharaoh,” the man sings two lines to the butler in uncharacteristic stillness, as if he is the sarcophagus. When a chained Joseph invites him to speak of his dreams, the nemes is removed to reveal a polished coif.^[28] He is immediately animated, completing the Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt’s transformation into an Elvis Presley knockoff, complete with a deep, Mississippi twang and undulating hips that cause the aforementioned sexy faience hippos to faint. The number being called “Song of the King” presumably means that this homage was chosen simply because of the shared title of “King” between Elvis and the unnamed Pharaoh. From any other vantage point, the connection is nonsensical. The entire scene throws itself into the tribute: The Apis dancers break into the hand jive, the guards wail on their staffs like guitars, and Pharaoh makes incredibly unsubtle lyrical references to “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up.” In a strange turn of events, before Pharaoh Elvis is even introduced, as a rhyme for “Get down on your knees,” the musical names this Pharaoh as “Ramses,” an assertion subject to incredibly fraught scholarly debate.^[29] This pharaoh is unnamed in the Hebrew Bible with little to no identifying characteristics. There are claims that the pharaoh is Amenemhat III, Sesostris I, or Thutmose IV. Ramses I has been portrayed in fiction as both the pharaoh who encounters Joseph and the pharaoh who encounters Moses, but the former occurred in 2000, meaning there was not a precedent for this choice when Lloyd Webber and Rice were writing.^[30] It is a rather bold claim for a musical otherwise relatively unconcerned with biblical or historical accuracy. The choice to claim knowledge of Egyptian history enough to name the pharaoh but also change him into an American cultural icon with just enough Egyptian material items to remind us of Egypt sets this scene in the realm of muddled Orientalism and Geertzian symbolism, even as it is “borrowing” from a White sensibility. Pharaoh’s outfit is also a cutout version of Elvis’s Pharaoh jumpsuit, as in it is a much skimpier version of the real thing. Even the King of Egypt cannot escape the hypersexualization that the production values above all else.

Conclusion

While I have delineated the problematic elements of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, I would be remiss to not acknowledge that the economy of fun it propagates, I think, works. The musical accomplished exactly what Lloyd Webber and Rice said they set out to do, which is to entertain. There is a reason that audiences have been enraptured with the production for the better part of fifty years, and that is the contagious joy of the performers. The music is catchy, even if reviews understandably criticize the lyrics as cliché. The show does not take itself too seriously, forever leaning further into its own wackiness. However, Lloyd Webber’s frequent argument that it is an apolitical work falls flat when considering the inherently political nature of adapting a biblical work outside of an explicitly religious venue, an important facet this paper has not even had time to touch on. In addition, the engagement in muddled Orientalism through pastiche means the musical will never be apolitical. Diluting cultures rich with history and nuance into a cigarette or a bull-headed rocking chair is appropriation. Somewhere between 1969 and 1981, Lloyd Webber and Rice decided rock was not fun enough on its own. And the public’s easy acceptance of that is troublesome in a society that wants to believe it is post-racial.