When I was in my twenties, exactly 50 Edinburgh Festivals ago, Frank Dunlop directed the first professional production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat which Andrew Lloyd Webber and I had written for a primary school concert in 1968. In the first four years of the work’s existence, it began to burrow its way into educational musical syllabi at a modest pace. This we appreciated, but in 1970 we stumbled into overnight success with our double album of Jesus Christ Superstar, and we did not thereafter give our earlier piece the attention it perhaps deserved. Superstar’s hefty impact on both record and stage did cause a certain amount of interest within musical circles, at least to the extent that theatricals wondered where these two slightly posh chaps had come from – and whether they had written anything else. Joseph was the only anything-else available.
Although in most quarters we were not unreasonably considered one-hit wonders (I tended to agree), Frank Dunlop spotted something he liked in our first biblical effort and got in touch to see if he could make it work for an adult cast and audience. He was perfectly happy with the 30-minute piece as it was, except he wanted to shift a few pronouns around so that, for example, the brothers sang their lines in the first person, rather than have great chunks of the piece as an oratorio in the third. Fine, we said, and sort of forgot about it and got on with the Superstar circus.
Two or three months later we were amazed to read rave reviews of Frank’s production of Joseph at the 1972 Edinburgh Festival. It was playing in a converted ice rink together with a first act of medieval plays based on the book of Genesis, and was selling out.
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