Luckily, the story’s central brothers are much more convincing to watch. And Rameses’s wife Nefertari’s main personality trait is snobbishness – her second-act solo ‘Heartless’ is an unexpected outbreak of emotion that’s too little, too late. She and Moses fall for each other while watching two sheep rut. Here, Tzipporah becomes an Esmeralda-esque figure who specialises in hip-weaving dance movies and one-note defiance.
The worst ones attempt to fill out these men’s relationships with their wives in disappointingly retro fashion, with Moses and Rameses bonding over their other halves being ‘difficult’. He pads the film’s taut story of Moses and Rameses’s rivalry with clumsy new scenes. Philip LaZebnik’s book isn’t quite as limber. There’s nothing this agile, ragged, bikini-clad crew can’t lend a kind of clumpy ’90s eroticism to. In front of them a huge, tumbling cast of physical theatre performers act as both the pyramid-building Hebrew slaves, and as the underdressed physical theatre incarnation of the story’s many ambitious plot points. Massive digital backdrops summon up the grandeur of its Ancient Egyptian setting with the monolithic graininess of ’90s PlayStation graphics. Schwartz’s son Scott brings the ancient story of two Biblical brothers to the stage with dust-raising chaotic energy. This massive new stage show probably won’t add substantially to the film’s fanbase, but it’s a pacy, powerfully sung showcase for songs like ‘When You Believe’. ‘The Prince of Egypt’ is the plucky, earnest underdog of ’90s animated movies: not even a celeb-heavy cast and a score of Stephen Schwartz bangers could save it from back-of-the-video-cabinet, cult flick oblivion.
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