Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat Musical: Part 1 - Meet Joseph
December 23, 2023 |
| Fulton Theatre, Lancaster in the backdrop...my musical booklet in the forefront. |
This post is part of a three part series; Part 1 - Meet Joseph, Part 2 - Joseph Musical, and Part 3 - Fulton Theatre
Hi beautiful people,
We have been sharing some of our experiences in my Happiness and Wellbeing Winter Class this week. The overall topic was the relationship between money and happiness, and some of the questions we tried to answer include: Do we need money to be happy? If yes, how much money? Does more money mean more happiness (or was Notorious BIG right when he said more money, more problems). We also looked at spending - Are we happier if we spend money on ourselves or on others? If we are happier spending on ourselves, is it when we spend it on experiences or on possessions?
Most of the studies we looked at agreed that 1) money plays a role in happiness but only to a certain extent, 2) spending money on others makes people happier, and 3) when people spend money on themselves, spending it on experiences instead possessions makes them happier.
One of our assignments was to write a reflection paper based on the studies, and also talk about our ‘experiences vs possessions stand’. I consider myself an experience over possession person - books and vinyl player/records do not count as possessions, right? Because we could only talk about one recent experience in our reflection paper, I saved this one for the blog - watching Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat musical at Fulton Theatre earlier this month. The show is still open until the end of the month so I will not give any spoilers in this recap which will get a little Biblical as I share about Joseph and a little Historical as I share about Fulton Theatre, Lancaster.
By now you know how much I love talking about Biblical narratives and the tea they share (I have a whole gossip glossary type page - Tea from the Bible ☕️). We will start our kiki session by talking about Joseph’s family tree; from his messy great-grandfather Abraham to his even messier grandfather Laban.
Somewhere after the creation story in the Book of Genesis (the first book in the Christian Bible) we meet a guy called Abraham who has a son called Isaac - yep this is the father son duo where the father tried to sacrifice the son. We aren’t told how he dealt with the trauma, but we are told that he married a lady called Rebecca and they had twins - Esau and Jacob. Esau was technically the first born but somehow thought that trading his birthright for a bowl of beans was a good business move (he read Jack and the Beanstalk for longer than is required).
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| Got a complimentary ticket for the show...if you can, do the middle aisle preferably downstairs...I am clearly not a top branch birds eye view person when it comes to the theatre - December 2023 |
Morning rolls in, Jacob sees #AboutLastNight reels and is not amused. He checks in with Laban and is informed that it is not customary for the second born to be married before the first born buuuut if Jacob still wants Rachel, he can have her in exchange for another 7 years of labor (which he agrees to). Can we pause and talk about how messy Laban is, why didn’t he tell Jacob all this earlier on? If you believe in karma, is this payback for what Jacob did to Esau or will we just say that all things happen for a reason and let it be? Also can we talk about how these men are ‘trading’ women like products and how they actively created tension among these sisters? I know Leah should have said no, but could she really? (The Bible has some of the messiest drama…and I live for it).
Now Jacob has two wives, who are also sisters (forget those reality tv shows, these are the OG Sister Wives). The sisters start giving birth left, right and center because back in the day (and to some extent today) a woman’s worth is pegged on how well her reproductive system worked (which is unfortunate). Rachel is not able to give birth immediately after marriage and so to keep up with the ‘pissing contest’ she ‘gives’ her assistant to Jacob to have babies on her behalf (again, women being traded, this time round by other women). When Leah sees this, she too, despite having her own kids, 'gives' Jacob her assistant.
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| Image Source |
At the end of the day, Jacob has 13 kids with Leah, Rachel, and their assistants Zilpa and Bilha. We only hear about the 12 sons who end up being the 12 tribes of Israel but there was a daughter, Dinah, whose story we will shelf for today - not because we want to continue with the trend of 'erasing/silencing girls' but if I go down that path, we will never get to Joseph and this Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat Musical experience. If you are curious, read Genesis 34 - please be warned that it involves sexual violence and revenge killings.
Also, if you are not sure how we went from 12 sons of Jacob to 12 tribes of Israel, well Jacob wrestled with God or one of his angels (the scholars and translators cannot come to a consensus), and because he showed up and showed out, he left the match with a new title - Israel - and the award of getting all the promises his grandfather Abraham had been given (which included having a great nation and loads of descendants). Based on this all his descendants (everyone on his family tree from then to date) are known as the Israelites, and his 12 sons became the 12 tribes of Israel.
See you on the next post.
Sending love and light,
Sitawa
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