Lee Mead Removes West End Dreamcoat on 10 Jan

Lee Mead (pictured), the winner of last year’s BBC reality TV competition Any Dream Will Do, will finish in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat on 10 January 2009, at the end of the musical’s current booking period.

Mead, already a professional performer prior to becoming a household name on Any Dream Will Do, has been performing the title role since the production opened at the West End’s Adelphi Theatre on 17 July 2007 (previews from 6 July). In addition to strong reviews, Mead was nominated for a Whatsonstage.com Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his performance (narrowly missing out to Michael Ball for Hairspray) and won the Variety Club prize for Outstanding New Talent.

No replacement casting has yet been announced. The current cast of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat also features fellow Whatsonstage.com Award nominee Dean Collinson as Pharaoh, Jenna Lee-James as the Narrator and Stephen Tate as Jacob/Potiphar/Guru.

Joseph started life in 1968 as a 20-minute entertainment for an end-of-term school concert. By the time it received its Broadway premiere in 1982, it had been expanded into a full two-hour show. With music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice, Joseph’s popular score includes the songs “Any Dream Will Do”, “Close Every Door to Me”, “Go, Go, Go Joseph”, “Those Canaan Days”, “Benjamin Calypso” and “One More Angel in Heaven”.

The new staging of the record-breaking 1990s production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the London Palladium, which was directed by the late Steven Pimlott, is designed by Mark Thompson and choreographed by Anthony Van Laast.

– by Terri Paddock