“Doing this show is like being at a big bar mitzvah party,” says Marc Jacobs.
The show is Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s youthful foray into the Old Testament, “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” and Jacobs is directing it for the American Musical Theatre of San Jose. Originally penned as a “pop cantata” for a school choir by the young composing team while still in college, “Joseph” has made its way into the canon of Lloyd Webber-Rice works and is frequently performed both in professional and community theater productions.
“It’s got an innocence that’s not in any of their other work,” Jacobs said. “I see it as a kind of child’s-eye view of the Bible so, in researching it I had to go back to my own days in Sunday and Hebrew School.”
Which brings us back to that big bar mitzvah he mentioned. Jacobs has clear memories of his own. Growing up in Los Angeles, his mother was employed as head bookkeeper in the office of University Temple. No question about Marc’s religious education.
“It came time for my bar mitzvah,” Jacobs recalled, “and it just so happened that my best friend was Burt Lancaster’s son. Of course I invited him and he asked ‘Is it OK if my father comes too? He’s never been to one.’
“So Burt Lancaster shows up at my bar mitzvah and he’s the only one there in sunglasses. After the ceremony, we’re standing by the gift table and people are coming by and my mother asked Mr. Lancaster what he thought of my bar mitzvah speech.
“‘Marc has great presence,’ he replied in that great voice of his and, to this day, I don’t know whether he meant stage presence or all the stuff on the table behind me.”
After some years, Jacobs took both his presence and his gifts, not in front of the footlights, but behind the scenes. He has directed for New York City Opera, the Houston Opera Center and the American Shakespeare Festival, and has worked with Hal Prince at the Mark Taper Forum and on Broadway. He presently is associate artistic director of the American Musical Theatre of San Jose where he has directed “The Music Man,” “La Cage aux Folles” and “Singin’ in the Rain,” among other shows.
He is having the time of his life with the story of Joseph, the favorite son who is sold into slavery by his jealous older brothers.
“My approach to this show is part fairy tale, part magical mystery tour, part divine inspiration and all fun,” he said. “This is not difficult with a score that features talking camels and snakes, a Pharaoh who looks like Elvis and a Jewish/Western hoe-down.”
Each number in the show utilizes a different musical style, he explained, from French chanson to reggae and rock ‘n’ roll. The hoe-down is a country-Western number called “There’s One More Angel in Heaven” and features the brothers, wearing cowboy vests decorated with Jewish stars.
“When they tell Jacob that his favorite son is dead, they are ashamed of what they have done and that shame translates to a kind of Gary Cooper ‘Aw, shucks’,” the director explained. “It’s sort of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ meets ‘Oklahoma’.”
The production even has an honest-to-goodness star. The central role of the narrator is taken by Paige O’Hara, who did the voice of Belle in the Disney film, “Beauty and the Beast.”
In spite of all the fun and games, however, “Joseph” tells a bona fide story of jealousy, revenge, forgiveness and a family reunited.
“You know, it’s the third story of sibling rivalry that occurs in Genesis,” Jacobs said. “First you have Cain and Abel, then Jacob and Esau and then Joseph and all his brothers.
“But this is the first one that ends in an act of forgiveness. Maybe it marks the beginning of a new ethic.”