The Amphitheatre is a large outdoor performance venue, part of the Tuacahn Center For The Arts in south west Utah near the town of St. George, USA. Basically though the venue is built in the middle of a desert, and so the cast and audience too would undoubtedly have had to cope with the inconveniences such an environs naturally creates: not least of all the nasty desert critters that live there such as scorpions, lizards and bats.
The production I watched, available on YouTube was from their regional premiere production in 2006, so quite a while ago now; but sadly I wasn't able to enjoy the performance or even see the show properly due to the amateur nature of the video. Filmed from the very rear of the auditorium with no zoom the whole time, there was no definition, focus or clarity - most of the time the cast were just tiny moving balls of light - and the sound quality wasn't much better either.
From what I could gather it looked like a hugely upbeat, big, bold and brassy interpretation of the show, with the tongue very much in the cheek. But sadly I am unable to make any further critique on this perofrmance due to the very poor quality video I was watching the performance on.
This show, like many of Lloyd-Webbers hits, has gone through several metamorphoses as songs and characters, or even dialogue are cut or added and so the show I watched here, was not the same show as the one I saw in Bochum, nor is it the same as the three professional productions I have thus far seen here in the UK. To my mind, the original West End production is still by far the best, and so why anyone thought it needed to change I have no idea.
Thanks Youtube uploader for allowing me to watch this show, but perhaps in future amateur videos such as these should be outlawed and the venues / producers if they wish to, film their shows themselves following copyright and Equity laws.
Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 9/6/20
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