The DreamWorks animated film The Prince of Egypt came out in 1998 and demonstrated that, if nothing else, Disney did not hold a monopoly on substantive animated movie musicals. The Stephen Schwartz songs were excellent, the visuals (traditional hand-drawn animation with some computer-generated backgrounds and effects) stunning, the story engaging and timeless, the characterizations rich and layered.

I'd had this movie on the back-burner of my mind ever since I first saw it, as something that might be adaptable for camp as a lower-camp show (since The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast had been so successful), and after successfully adapting The Nightmare Before Christmas, which was quite difficult, I figured The Prince of Egypt should be next. It is interesting to note that this would be the third year in a row that one of the shows would be "biblical" (after 2000's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and 2001's Jesus Christ Superstar, although the latter is NOT based on scripture), and the second of three shows using ancient Egypt as its setting (after Joseph…, the third being Aida, 2004). Since The Prince of Egypt, like Joseph…, is Old Testament (Exodus), hence rooted firmly in Jewish history and tradition, no one took issue with it, and a lot of people assumed that I was doing this show to "make up for" 2001's supposed "Christian" motif (The Nightmare Before Christmas and Jesus Christ Superstar). That, of course, is absurd; not to launch into another discussion of the non-existent religious aspects of those two shows, but in any case, I never do and never would feel the need to "make up for" anything.

The Prince of Egypt would present a challenge which I had not faced since The Lion King: the movie doesn't really have enough songs to sustain the narrative, so I would once again have to compose additional lyrics with the existing music to provide needed exposition and keep the dialogue to a minimum. The results were an extra verse of the opening number, "Deliver Us;" two additional versions of the song "All I Ever Wanted," one sung by Rameses at the beginning to express his angst over inheriting his father's throne, one by Moses as he leaves Egypt and wonders what to do with his life; and a brief reprise of "Deliver Us," sung just before Moses' accidental killing of the guard. I also added the song "I Will Get There," composed by Diane Warren and sung by Boyz II Men on the soundtrack album, giving it to Tzipporah, Aaron and Miriam to sing during Tzipporah's escape.

The film-to-stage adaptation also presented a number of technical challenges; how, for example, could we create or visualize the Burning Bush, the Angel of Death, or the parting of the Red Sea? I had seen several stage productions where waving fabric had been used to represent flowing water, so for both the Nile river and the Red Sea we used long sheets of lightweight blue fabric, held up and waved at the foot of the stage by a few young cast members who had been specifically designated as "Special Effects Artists." For the opening number, "Deliver Us," where Yochebed places Moses in the basket and sends it down the Nile, two of the children held up the fabric while the other held up the basket behind it and moved it across the stage. We also used corresponding sheets of red fabric to show the Nile turning to blood. For the parting of the Red Sea, we had the fabric stapled together at the center, and the children simply pulled the fabric sections apart as the cast walked through the gap and down the aisle toward the back of the theatre.

We created the Burning Bush with an old round portable fan, about ten inches in diameter, placed on the floor facing upward. We wedged some long, bare twigs into the fan grating, spray-painted them gold and tied strips of yellow, white and orange streamers to the ends. To create the effect, we turned on the fan so the strips would blow upward, and trained a bright spotlight on the entire assembly.

For two other effects, we used a device that had always been available but that I had never deigned to use: the video projector. The last thing I ever wanted to do in producing a show at camp was to have to resort to showing part of the source material on video; that, to me, always seemed like "cheating." But in this case it seemed not only appropriate but desirable to use two particular scenes from the film, projected against the stage backdrop (not the pull-down video screen). The first was the dream sequence near the beginning of the film, which is not only one of the most impressive pieces of animation I have ever seen, but provides an essential plot point. I really wanted to show this sequence. The other was the "Angel of Death" scene; watching the supplemental materials on the DVD and seeing what a hard time the actual film's animators had visualizing it, I realized that we would have no really effective means of doing so, and watching the scene from the movie I figured it would look and sound just fine as a background projection. Both scenes are free of dialogue and contain only background music and/or sound effects. Ultimately, I think the use of these two very brief clips from the film worked extraordinarily well in the context of our production; the only drawbacks, really, were that the projector lamp took several seconds to warm up, so the beginning of each clip was not fully-lit; and the unit itself was mounted so high as to have its light beam partially blocked by the proscenium, cutting off the image several feet from the top of the backdrop (it was, of course, mounted for use with the screen, which is in front of the proscenium, not the backdrop behind it).

2002 was the year that I established what remains the summer's sequence of shows: lower, then middle, then upper, essentially reversing what I had started with in 1998. Aside from my simply wanting to get the lower camp show out of the way early, it seemed to make significantly more sense overall to do the lower-camp show first. Upper-camp participation in shows had always been low, not because the kids weren't interested in theatre in general, but because it was just extremely difficult to get anyone to audition on the very first day of camp (note, for example, the relative cast sizes of Tommy and Joseph… in 2000). Add that to the fact that I usually wound up with far too many lower-campers auditioning, significantly more than I ever really needed, and it became clear that doing the lower-camp show first would likely address both of those issues. Also, having staff involved in Jesus Christ Superstar had gone over so well, and the show itself had seemed like such a momentous event, that we decided to continue to do that with the upper-camp show, which would therefore continue to be a major event in late summer leading into Color War. Given the changes in the camp calendar, which had been gradually shortening the first half of camp but not the second (and would continue to do so in subsequent years), we would have almost as much time for the third show as we did for the first two shows combined, which would offset the time lost by any cast members going on overnight trips during the rehearsal process for the third show. The middle-camp show was usually the best to present on Visiting Day. Add all these factors together, and the lower-middle-upper sequence made the most sense logistically.

The Prince of Egypt turned out to be one of our better lower-camp shows. All of the main cast were essentially new to the theatre program (except Eric Thurm, who had one line in The Nightmare Before Christmas as a freshman and put forth a strong, impassioned performance as Rameses here), and all performed well. In addition to Eric, Ben Spivack, who played Moses, was especially impressive, as were Bryanna Mazzella (Miriam) and freshman Nina Carlin, who we cast as the little girl who sings the Hebrew solo in "When You Believe." We also had another memorable adult-staff cameo, as the voice of G-d.
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