Prince of Egypt- Unmaking of a Classic
- Rebecca Burnham
- Aug 7
- 11 min read
As promised, this week, I’m giving a candid review of the stage musical version of The Prince of Egypt, which is currently showing to sold-out audiences during our Summer Theatre Festival at Cardston Alberta. I’m writing this with some angst because, unlike last week’s review, this one is mixed. I honour the incredible work of a dedicated company of deeply respected actors and actresses who have poured their hearts and souls into sharing this story with us. But I felt real disappointment about the stage adaptation itself.
There is value in the axiom “if ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Still, when you are adapting a movie into a stage musical, you need to make some changes, and not just because of both the limitations and opportunities of the stage. You want to make it fresh somehow, especially if the original work is more than a ¼ century old. So there had to be differences between the 1998 movie version and the 2020 stage version of The Prince of Egypt. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the bulk of those changes inspiring. Overall, they turned a mighty story into something that was perplexing and even disturbing. What follows is my spoiler-filled review.
The Good – A Live Set
There were some changes I enjoyed, like the extremely creative choreography. I was especially intrigued by this after writing last week about the live dancer-created set that was featured in original stagings of James and the Giant Peach. While the live set wound up being cut from the final version of that show, presumably because it was too spooky for the target audience, I thought it worked much better in Prince of Egypt. It was intriguing to watch Yocheved, Moses’s mother, darting around “pillars” formed from dancers standing on each other’s shoulders. When she placed her baby’s basket in the “river” she put it into the hands of dancers, dressed in blue and lying on the stage, who swirled about while passing it from hand to hand, until it “floated” up to where it could be found by Tuya.
I appreciated this innovation because it invites a great deal of creativity and offers a much bigger role to the ensemble. It seems tricky to strike the right balance, so that the live set doesn’t distract from the story. But it was performed gorgeously the night I watched. And the opening number, “Deliver Us,” was breathtaking, visually stunning, and an auditory feast.
The Medium - Meatier Roles for Women and Ramses
Another difference that I appreciated to some degree, was that the stage version deepened the roles of several women, and of Ramses, who was depicted more as a victim of scheming power-brokers than as a villain himself. And there was a moment at the end that almost made Ramses as much a protagonist as Moses. He gets a redemption arc, which I tend to support in principle. Unfortunately, it occurred in the context of an overarching message that I couldn’t get behind.
The Problematic: Messier Moses
The real trouble started with Moses’ I Want song, a wistful number that betrayed a hopeless longing in Moses’ heart to be important like his brother. But where Ramses’ name would be etched deep in stone all over Egypt, Moses’ would be like “Footprints on the Sand,” erased soon after he passed. This is a significant departure from the movie, where Moses’s I Want song “All I Ever Wanted” (which still appears in the stage version) was retrospective. There, he highlighted the life of careless privilege and the unquestioned belonging he enjoyed before confronting the secret that he was a Hebrew and kin to the slaves that he hadn’t even looked upon as people. And we got another peak into his initial mindset during “The Plagues” when he sang, “Once I called you brother. Once I thought the chance to make you laugh was all I ever wanted.”
I Want songs are important. They highlight that dream of our protagonist that drives his story forward, usually through the whole of the first act. And if what they want changes through the course of the show, that change points us toward the overarching themes of the story. In the stage musical, “Footprints on the Sand” gives us a fundamentally different Moses, struggling with frustrated ambition and trying to reconcile himself to a life of relative unimportance. It’s a different take that isn’t necessarily problematic except for the questionable light that it casts on his choices. Was his challenge of Ramses to a havoc-creating chariot race partially motivated by a desire to undermine him in Seti’s eyes? That’s a little messy. Much messier is the question that occurs of whether his later call to stand in opposition to his brother was embraced as an opportunity to get his name engraved in history, even at the cost of calling down destruction upon Egypt. Not that such mixed motives aren’t a very human thing. But instead of pulling me more closely into Moses’ inner world and coaxing me to root for him, the song tends to be more off-putting. It’s also setting me up for a much darker take on Moses’ ministry which we’ll get to later.
Missing Comic Relief
The next thing that I found disappointing was the transformation of the comic priestly duo Hotep and Yu into just Hotep, who winds up being the true villain of the show. This removes some valuable comic relief that is replaced rather awkwardly. The new jokes don’t land well.
Hasty, Red-Flag Romance
Then there’s Moses’s relationship with Tzipporah, which has changed in significant ways that don’t strike me as an improvement. In the movie, Moses meets Tzipporah at a public celebration, when she’s given by the priests as a backhanded gift to Ramses, only to break free and try to escape. Moses recaptures her, grabbing the end of her rope, and then lets go while she’s pulling against it so that she tumbles into a fountain while the onlookers laugh. Then Moses chuckles at his own cleverness, until he catches his mother Tuya’s eye and sees her disappointment. This awakens him to the slave girl’s distress at the same time that Ramses regifts her to Moses.
In the stage version, Tzipporah is given to Ramses by his father and she is ordered to dance. Moses suggests removing her bonds, so she can dance better, and she shimmies and swivels provocatively while singing that this is not for them, but she will “Dance to the Day” she is free.
I think this is supposed to be empowering for women, but I can’t see it that way. I think Tuya’s influencing her son to see the humanity in a slave girl and that she deserves respect, speaks to a sisterhood that is more empowering to women. And I don’t think that a slave, with no right of refusal, who performs a sexy song and dance for her captors is empowered. The claim that she’s dancing for herself, not them, comes across more as a tease than as a statement of personal power. I think an empowered woman would tone down the sexy and amp up her regality in such a circumstance.
Next, in the movie, Moses approaches his bedchamber with an apology on his lips, only to discover that Tzipporah has just escaped. He catches sight of her and quietly follows, distracting some guards in order to help her get away and keeping his distance until he sees her safely out of the city. That’s when he meets his birth family, which leads to his departure into the desert.
In the stage version, Tzipporah enters Moses’s bedchamber in the process of escaping from Ramses’s rooms. She challenges him verbally, leaves her scarf in his hands, and escapes through his window. Then Ramses enters, looking for her and becomes suspicious of his brother. Moses explains the scarf and says he’ll bring her back. He is about to recapture her when he’s distracted by meeting his birth siblings. Once again, we’re seeing Moses in a less admirable light, and we have less reason to get onboard for a relationship between them.
In the movie, Moses next meets her after he’s fled to Midian and protected her sisters from some thieving bullies at their father’s well. Tzipporah first returns the dunking he gave her, but then brings him home to her father, who thanks him for protecting his daughters at the well and for helping Tzipporah escape Egypt. When Moses continues to doubt his worth, Jethro sings “Heaven’s Eyes,” a song which compresses several months into a few minutes, during which time we see Moses and Tzipporah gradually fall in love and get married.
In the stage version, Moses protects the sisters and gets the dunking in Jethro’s well. But Tzipporah is infuriated that her father insists on showing respect to this pampered palace brat who mistreated her in Egypt. Then, when Moses doubts his worth, Jethro sings “Heaven’s Eyes” which, if it compresses time, only seems to fill up one evening, but Moses and Tzipporah are hand in hand by the end. It’s obviously too soon for them to get married, so we next see Tzipporah visiting Moses while he’s tending the sheep. They are emboldened to sing about their love for each other (“Never in a Million Years”) and wind up kissing after watching an unnamed ram copulate with the ewe named after Tzipporah. This is supposed to be comical, but it doesn’t give me a chance to buy into the relationship. I find myself longing for a conditional love song here that acknowledges and resolves their troubled history so that we can be longing for that kiss before it happens.
The biggest problem I had was with how the stage version depicts God. I’m not talking about the choice to use the ensemble chorus as the divine voice, or the way that the West End staging has the dancers portray the burning bush. Whenever I hear the voice of God portrayed theatrically, I’m reliably disappointed, sure they didn’t get it right. The movie version took an ingenious approach to this problem by having the actor who played Moses also provide the divine voice, conveying the idea that we hear God in the voice of our mind. That wasn’t an option for the stage version, and I personally found the chorus of voices singing together to be an effective approach.
So it wasn’t the divine voice that bothered me. It was the words attributed to God, and the impression they gave about the divine nature. Near the end of the 10 plagues, Moses breaks down and asks God why he has to be an instrument of such cruelty to the Egyptians. God answers with (as near as I can remember) the same words that Seti uses in the movie version to justify the killing of all the Hebrew baby boys: “Sometimes, for the greater good, sacrifices must be made.” This completely undoes Moses, who wants to quit but God persuades him to hold fast for one more plague, in which all the firstborn of the Egyptians are killed. Then Moses sings, “For the Rest of My Life” about the crushing weight on his soul of the part he played in bringing atrocities upon his victims. “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.” He asks, “Does a noble end mean any means will do? Is your power the only reason to follow You?”
He collapses in despair, only to be comforted by Tzipporah and Miriam with the news that the Hebrews are free at last. They all join in a chorus of “There can be miracles when you believe.” And somehow, we are supposed to just move on from the notion that sometimes, serving God means committing atrocities, but we need to harden our hearts and do it, because believing opens the door to the miracles we need.
I can’t help being reminded of what I wrote in June, in my review of Epic, about the importance of standing up to mighty powers that demand ruthlessness from us. I’m inclined to think the song reflects anguished questions in the hearts of Schwartz and LaZebnik. If so, I have to respect their raising the questions rather than turning a blind eye to them. But I wish they hadn’t put a villainous answer into God’s mouth. That they’d portrayed God’s doings in Egypt more accurately, making more of an effort to understand how folks who believe that God is love could grapple successfully with the plagues of Egypt and other difficult passages in the scriptures. And that they’d used something other than this beloved musical as a vehicle for exploring an image of God as a purveyor of ruthlessness.
I don’t feel like I can leave this without setting the record a little more straight and giving some of my own answers to the questions raised in “For the Rest of My Life.”
A Loving God’s Opposition To Humans’ Degrading and Exploiting Each Other
I’ll start by noting some details from the Biblical account of the Exodus that don’t make it into the show. According to the Bible, Moses didn’t ask Pharoah to free the slaves. He only asked permission to take them three days’ journey into the desert, to worship their God on Mt. Sinai. Pharoah refused so Moses warned him that God would send plagues on Egypt until he let them go. Each time Pharoah relented and agreed they could go, Moses asked God to end the plague. Each time, once the plague had ended, Pharoah changed his mind. And the cycle repeated until the deaths of the firstborn, when Pharoah ordered them to leave and never come back.
If God is love and if all His children are equally precious to Him, and if death is not the end of the soul, but merely a transition to the next phase of our becoming ready to return to Him, then maybe, what happened in Egypt was not an atrocity. Certainly it caused suffering, but it also taught two nations that people should not be owned. Maybe the Exodus story is not about the Hebrews being so special that God ordered Moses to flagellate Egypt in order to free them. Maybe instead it centers on how deeply opposed God is to His children exploiting each other; how important it is to stand up for the dignity of those who are treated as lowly and undeserving of basic respect.
Beauty in Collaboration
That would be a timely message right now, that could put a fresh perspective on the source material while preserving its essence. So how did it happen that the stage adaptation veered so far from the original, especially when Philip LaZebnik, who wrote the book, is credited with writing the screenplay of the movie, and composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz also wrote all the songs for the movie.
At least part of the answer is in the fact that the movie was a profoundly collaborative production. It was DreamWorks Animation’s first feature, and co-founder/CEO Jeffrey Katzenburg was determined to do it right. "One of the things we decided when we took the decision to make the movie was that this is not our story,” he told journalist Dan Wooding. “From the very beginning it was our goal and our mandate to take this Bible story and to be as faithful and accurate in our telling of it as we could be..,we did not want…to do anything that would affect or change or diminish the essence of the message, the values of the story as it exists in the Bible.”
The story was created by a team of 14 storyboard artists before LaZebnik wrote the screenplay. They also consulted with a multitude of experts, including Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians. "We have met with as many different faith communities as you can possibly imagine,” said DreamWorks spokeswoman Tzivia Schwartz-Getzug. “We have reached out as broadly and as deeply as we can [to ensure] we are understanding the story as they understand it." The studio then made expensive changes to bring the film in line with the feedback they received. The movie was released with the disclaimer, “While artistic and historical license has been taken, we believe that this film is true to the essence, values and integrity of a story that is a cornerstone of faith for millions of people worldwide.”
For me, the difference between the movie and the stage version of Prince of Egypt is strong evidence for the inspirational power of collaborating to tell a shared story. And the benefits are not just in the inspiration that a shared story provides. Prince of Egypt the movie solidly launched DreamWorks as a Disney competitor and continues to receive acclaim today. By contrast, Prince of Egypt the stage musical had just a 39-week West End run that met with mixed reviews.
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