The Prince of Egypt Musical was a hot mess

"Why are they voguing to the plagues?" 😂😂😂

Moral of the Story: Do not underestimate the power of an animated movie because one weak link can break the chain of amazing storytelling.

The most annoying thing about that scene with young Miriam telling the Queen that Moses's name means "deliverance": it objectively, definitively, does NOT mean "deliverance". It means "child of the Nile" or "pulled from the water", because the Queen literally found him in the Nile.

Can we talk about the horrendous costumes? Who told this people those costumes were ancient Egyptian and Hebrew? I absolutely despise the fact that they did not respect the time the story is set and how it’s supposed to be.

The choice to absolve Ramses by having him be "manipulated" into his decisions just removes all the bite and the tragedy from the original film. The reason why there's such high emotional stakes in the original film is because Ramses believes the only way he can fulfill his legacy is to be absolute- even when faced with losing people he loves. By putting that absolutism on advisors and his wife, it removes all responsibility for the willful ignorance Ramses has adopted from his father, and why Ramses' punishment to live with the bitterness of losing both his son and his brother for the rest of his days due to his own absolutism no longer rings true. To shift that responsibility fundamentally weakens the ending. Ugh.

"Why are they vogueing to the Plagues?" is my favorite sentence ever right now 🤣

Prince of Egypt was one of my favourite movies growing up so I really wanted to like this musical but i have to agree its doesn't capture the epicness that made the movie so iconic. The ending change for me was the greatest sin. Making moses and ramses have a best friend moment at the end strips away the melancholy and bittersweetness of the situation. The adaptation felt toothless seeing as they dampened the darker aspects of the movie.

One of the things that made Prince of Egypt movie so incredibly strong, was that it new exactly when to hold back. After Moses discovers the paintings of Hebrew children being slaughtered, Seti reacts with a simple "they were only slaves". And that line lives rent free in my nightmares. Same with the final plaugue. No music, no color, no dead bodies. Just the sighs and that ominous luminescent cloud. I have to go watch it now

For me at least the great sin with the ensemble is that it actively dehumanizes the Hebrew slaves. Like, I'm not saying it couldn't have been done tastefully, but turning them into set pieces, the Nile River, and... sand? means that we the audience are constantly used to seeing them not as people, but as things--as useful objects to tell the story, instead of as a group of oppressed people. How are we supposed to feel their plight when they are, essentially, set dressing? The point of this story is that life matters, that dehumanization is actively wrong--see Seti's comment that "they were only slaves" and Moses's horrified response in the original movie. Here, they are only sand, they are only water, they are only the walls of the temple. If there was any show to have your ensemble be human, it was this one. Can't believe they failed so badly.

What. Did. They. Do. To. Miriam?!?! She was rough in the Bible, don’t get me wrong, but not chewing the scenery harder than a production designer in bath salts. And in the film she’s the steady, unwavering-but-kind voice of reason. She’s someone weighed down by grief but too stubborn to let it go when a chance for real freedom presents itself; Miriam of the film isn’t the twee “I’m so pure and good and innocent and that’s why I hope” girl, she’s the “I have been deeply traumatized and oppressed since conception, but hope is all I have left and I’m holding onto it by my fingernails” girl.

Wait no!! That beautiful moment where Tuya looks her child in the eye and asks 'Did you hate us all along?' and for just a breathe you can feel actual pain and grief and betrayal and for a split second Moses looks like the lost little boy he was when she found him. And then it gets ripped apart with no time for emotional payout by the Chorus of Body Horror has blocking to do!

"Why are they voguing to the plagues?” may be the funniest one-off line of the year and it's only January.

Using the chorus to symbolize the suffering people and also things such as the chariots might have worked because to limit it to items the pharohs are using plays into the dehumanization that they're going through, but that gets lost when they're also the nile and all the other nature items

So glad y'all covered this musical. There were SO MANY missed opportunities from a stylistic and director's point of view. I hope this gets a revamp because the potential this has to be a groundbreaking musical (because the music is already amazing).

The same designer also made the costumes for the Disney Beauty and the Beast musical but these designchoices are SOOO wierd. Why is the pharohs clothe more remenicent of King Uther? And his wifes dress is something out of a cheap pagent??? And the boys? They look like gym bros with a mix of athletic clothes and formal wear, but like, branded, who’s about to come over and hit on or bully you. And DON’T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON THE CROWNS. They had historical advisors on Alladin, did they not have someone for this??! I think what they should have done was hirering a designer with ties to egypt, and even if you’re not of the culture, if you’re representing historical people you do historic research!!. I’m studying to become a costume designer myself and I can’t defend ANY of the costumes in this production, and I really like the film so I was SO dissapointed.

Tell me you've never read the bible without telling me you've never read the bible. I watched the filmed stage version with my family and couldn't help but feel like the production team had no clue what the point of the story was. They saw the Dreamworks movie and thought "man, this could be a cute story about two brothers who fight each other then make up--we should really lean into this bromance and nothing else." They wanted to feel clever by making "Prince of Egypt" refer to both Moses and Ramses. At the end, I couldn't help but face palm as Moses and Ramses had a "buddy bow" for the final bows as double protagonists. The sense of wonder and awe from the roots of the story are completely lost, and I think audiences can feel that. The story of Moses is dark but it's also full of wonder and awe at God's power. I feel like that got completely lost in the production team's desire to make the characters more hip and relateable. I think they wanted to take a different angle and see more of the Egyptian side of the story, but the cheesey, early modern european costumes ruined any chance of that happening in my opinion.

If I'd been writing the script, I might have had Nefretari telling Rameses not to pursue the Hebrews by the end and him insisting on it, a complete reversal of their earlier roles, sort of like Lady Macbeth and her husband with one feeling guiltier as the story went on and the other feeling less guilty.

I can understand what they were trying to get at with the children dying; in the movie, a few children are shown dying in a similar way - they exhale, their soul slips past their lips, they die - but notably the children you see dying onscreen are asleep so there's no awkward wide mouth inhale and then collapse. The one child you see die who is awake dies off-camera; they pass through a doorway carrying a jug to collect water, then you hear the jug shatter from being dropped and a small hand falls into view. Ultimately in live action, without CGI, there's no way to make dying by exhaling look good.

I remember seeing a live performance of the cast do “when you believe” and thought it was so beautiful. I’m so sad to see that this is the final product of that.

Sapora is such a well defined and expressive character that I literally NEVER noticed that she doesn't even have lines in the second half, and I've seen this movie like a dozen times