The Prince of Egypt: The Musical

2023

It is a no-brainer that Broadway legend Stephen Schwartz (Godspell, Wicked, etc.) would create a full-length epic Broadway musical out of his Oscar-winning work on DreamWorks’s surprisingly good The Prince of Egypt. It is one of THE stories, and his songs and score for the animated movie were excellent. Moreover, there hasn’t been a successful stage musical of the Exodus (which is surprising, because—as I said—it is a foundational story with all the elements of a great narrative, it has the high emotions needed for musical treatment, and it is of major import to some of the Western world’s most widespread religions). I myself have listened to the strains of “Deliver Us” and pictured glorious staging options.

Well, that’s just what Schwartz did…at the precise beginning of the COVID theatre shutdown. Someone had the good sense to make this recording of the West End production…but I wish I had stuck to my imagination.

There are numerous songs that the composer clearly thought would be powerful and successful, but roughly one of them is any good (“All I Ever Wanted”). True, the tunes from the film are a wonderful base, and they have the epic feel that could soar on a major Broadway stage. But the rest of his new score is simply limp and forgettable.

Plus: Schwartz and his team have woven (at least their approximation of) ancient Hebrew and Egyptian language and dance into the piece. It’s welcome!

Minus: This is a dance-reliant show. Instead of a set, a very large ensemble of impressive dancers create every character as well as every setting. It is a big swing that could have worked beautifully…except that it didn’t. Choreographer Sean Cheesman (That is his name.) mistakes contortion and frenzy for good dance. In the hands of a choreographer who could relax a bit more and go for ‘beautiful’ over ‘impressive’, I can see the device working. As it is, when the dancers climbed atop one another to form the burning bush, I audibly groaned. And that’s only halfway through the story.

There is another major (and interesting) wrinkle: Act I tells the film’s version of the story nicely, but Act II begins to seriously go off-book. It’s wonderful that Miriam is treated as the prophetess she was, but she was also the only Hebrew I remember mentioning God. Moses has his (very brief) encounter with “I AM that I AM”, but from then on, he is not a prophet but an unwilling superhero. (At the banks of the Red Sea he says, “Maybe I have one more miracle in me.” No, Mo, you have no miracles in you, and if I thought that the writer was foreshadowing your eventual rock-hitting scandal, I could take it…but he’s not.) Miriam mentions vague visions of “Moses delivering us.” Aaron never acts as Moses’s spokesman, but simply whines a little. All of the Ten Plagues (often the main events of the story) take place during one song, seemingly during one argument. Moses never mentions them. No one really mentions them. But as Moses and Rameses have their brotherly squabble, they sort of happen in back projections. Then, the Death of the Firstborn is depicted with a nice, simple theatrical motif. This is the end of the story I know from, you know, Exodus. (And it’s odd, because Stephen Schwartz has done so many Biblical works before so well.)

Realizing that he has just '“committed an atrocity,” Moses sings for a long time about how the death of the Egyptian children will haunt him for the rest of his life. Darn God and his penchant for genocide, right? Then Rameses’s wife sings for a while about the death of her child and the Egyptians’ general misunderstood nature. The Hebrews finally leave, arriving at the Red Sea, where Moses finds that one last miracle deep inside him, and suddenly Rameses is there. To chase them across so that horse and rider are thrown into the sea? No, to apologize for enslaving the Hebrews. Moses apologizes for the Death of the Firstborn, and they curse the cycle of violence that has marked their lives. They reconcile. They hug. They’re good. BUT, a mad priest suddenly leads, like, 8 people into the sea, while Rameses yells, “NO!” They die. But the priest was corrupt anyway. Cue final happy song about believing in miracles, sung by Moses, the Hebrews, Rameses, and his Queen. Curtain.

Eye roll.

Rant.

Shrug.