First things first, I love the movie. But this isn’t the movie [spoiler alert].
The great songs from the movie are all there - and performed beautifully. The dancing is energetic, sexy, and creative: the chariot chase was a particularly clever scene, with actors playing both tumbling chariots and racing horses.
And then there are the additional songs - written by Stephen Schwartz (of Godspell fame, who also wrote the songs for the original Prince of Egypt movie). Some of these are great - ‘Footprints on the Sand’, and ‘Always on your Side’ both add to the relationship between the two princes and are worthy additions to the book. But with one exception (which I’m coming to) the rest of the new songs didn’t do it for me; they felt like they had been added to provide sing-by-numbers opportunities for different cast members to show off their impressive vocal skills, without really adding to the narrative or providing any great musical hooks.
But the most interesting addition was Moses' song, ‘For the Rest of My Life’, where he rails at God for making him the instrument of God’s vengeance against the Egyptians:
For the rest of my life
I will have to live with this
For the rest of my life
I’ll have to face the part I played
These faces filled with grief and with despair
Every morning when I wake up they’ll be there
Seared into my memory
With a cruel burning knife
For the rest of my life
Oh, there’s a weight on my soul
Like a pyramid of stone
There’s a weight on my soul
A ransom never to be paid
The crimes I do, I do them in your name
I feel just as guilty, all the same
Like a brutal soldier
Who does anything he’s told
There’s a weight on my soul
For the rest of my life
When you know you’re in the right
It’s so easy to be wrong
You have to win the fight
So you close your mind and heart up tight
And go along
Tell yourself you’re staying strong
You ramp up your ferocity
Excuse any atrocity
But once you’ve won
You have to live with what you've done
And for the rest of my life
I will have to live with this
For the rest of my life
These questions haunting me like ghosts
Does a noble end mean any means will do?
Is your power the only reason to follow You?
And one final question I see no answer to
For the rest of my life
How will I get through?
Unlike so many of our victims
I have the rest of my life
To get through
For me, this exploration of Moses' guilt and anger is not only the high point of the musical, but also the gateway to where I think it falls down.
Because it reveals the underlying theology: The only baddies in this show are the deities.
Moses is an ‘innocent puppet’ (to quote Pontius Pilate from Jesus Christ Superstar) and we see the same thing happening with Pharaoh.
Possibly the most bizarre twist of the musical is the revisionist retelling of Rameses, who comes across as a thoroughly nice, if slightly naïve, ruler, who wants to do nothing more than give Moses everything he is asking for, but is constrained by the ghost of his father and the demands of the high priest.
Several times Rameses releases the Israelites, only for the word of the gods to countermand his decision and send in the army instead.
This is, in the end, playing to a zeitgeist that sees all the evils of human warfare and violence as the end result of religious belief; and the subtext is clear: if only Moses and Rameses had been left to become the mature, fully-integrated humans they were longing to be, without divine interference, everyone would have lived happily ever after.
They’d have got away with it, if it hadn’t been for those pesky gods.
And this feels like a betrayal of the story - it sanitises the complexities of the Passover, it excuses the excesses of the empire, and ultimately it silences God as a player within human drama.
So - worth watching? A qualified yes.
It’s the West End at its musical best, but unlike some other shows which also do truly great theology (The Book of Mormon is one example), this would have done better to stick more closely to the film, or indeed the book, on which it is based.
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