‘Joseph’ Stops in L.A. : Soap opera star Michael Damian says he’s incorporated ‘everything I’ve learned’ into Broadway-bound musical at Pantages

In a sense, soap star Michael Damian has always been preparing to play Joseph in the musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber that opens Thursday at the Pantages in Hollywood.

First off, Damian is from a big family, a huge family by modern standards. The Joseph of Genesis had 11 brothers, the majority of whom resented his favorite-son status enough to sell him into slavery in Egypt.

Damian has six sisters and two brothers (during a recent rehearsal, his dressing room was noisy with nieces). And while his siblings never tried to sell Damian into bondage--indeed, he was one of the lead vocalists in the family rock band--his sibs did needle him from time to time. It’s what the offspring of large families do almost as well as dividing desserts with scientific precision. (You wonder how the sibling-savvy author of Genesis failed to include the rule that the brother who cuts the pie isn’t the brother who gets to pick the first piece.)

Actually, Damian is not the first person in his family to put on a coat of many colors and play the part of Joseph, the spoiled, then-savaged sibling who survives to save his family. His grandmother had that honor. The occasion was a pageant at the all-girls school she attended in her native Italy.

“Do you know the story?” his grandmother asked when she heard that Damian would be donning the Technicolor dream coat in the Broadway-bound production. “I’m always telling you to read the Bible!”

If Damian was not necessarily the favorite son (modern parents are so much more tactful about such matters than biblical patriarchs), he has had the sort of career than anybody might envy.

At 17, Damian was lip-syncing his cover of Eric Carmen’s “She Did It” on Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” when he was spotted by the producers of CBS-TV’s “The Young and the Restless.” Since 1981, he has played Danny Romalotti on the fabulously successful soap.

The Romalotti character is based on Damian himself, which has given him a unique opportunity to advance his singing career while laboring in the lucrative vineyards of daytime drama. He writes songs that he subsequently sings on the soap and has had a couple of hit singles, including “Rock On,” in the course of his 12-year TV career. Record deals and concert tours have followed.

Damian plans to appear on the soap throughout the run of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” which continues to sell out in London. And, in the best tradition of cross-marketing (or show-biz synergy, as it is now called), the makers of “The Young and the Restless” have written Damian’s “Joseph” gig into the plot.

In the soap, when Andrew Lloyd Webber calls to ask Romalotti if he will play Joseph, he hesitates only because his TV wife is agonizing over her sexual harassment subplot. In real life, Damian said, he didn’t hesitate for a nanosecond. “There’s nothing to think about,” he told himself. “I’m going to do it.”

Damian has sung the musical’s “Close Every Door” on TV and “Joseph’s” director, Steven Pimlott, has appeared on the soap as the musical’s director. “Am I acting now or am I really telling you this?” Pimlott wondered aloud at one point. But, for the most part, Damian said, life imitating art imitating life has gone as swimmingly as Joseph’s career as Pharaoh’s chief magistrate.

Damian said he loves the challenge of the Webber musical. “This is the first chance for me to incorporate everything I’ve learned and do it all at once.”

“Joseph” is a decidedly youthful show. The protagonist is less ancient Israelite than young stud-let, although clearly not yet ready for Potiphar’s seductive wife. Damian wears a white loincloth for much of the show, and the role has been played in other times and venues by such certified stoppers of pre-pubescent hearts as David Cassidy and Donny Osmond. No surprise, since Webber wrote it in 1967 at the request of his younger brother’s music teacher, who wanted a pop cantata for the choir to sing at an Easter concert.

According to Pimlott, the original, with lyrics by Tim Rice, was only 20 minutes long. The piece has evolved into a full-fledged musical in the opulent Webber tradition, with stuffed camels, a Sphinx as big as a pyramid and four children’s choirs, including the Colors of Love Children’s Chorus from Encino and the Hawthorne School Chorus from Beverly Hills.

Pimlott, a respected British director of operas as well as plays, is undaunted by the prospect of directing a hundred singing, dancing children. “It’s much easier than directing grown-ups,” said Pimlott, who also directed the British production. “A, they do what they’re told. And B, on the whole, they do it better.”

Indeed, Pimlott likes working with American performers of whatever age. “You don’t get the moaning and groaning and grousing you get in England,” which he characterized as “a moany, groany place in the best of times.”

Pimlott said the audience he had in mind while preparing the new “Joseph” was the one he always tries to appeal to--himself. But he does plan to take his 2-year-old to see the show. In Pimlott’s view, good material speaks to any audience. Moreover, young Pimlott has already demonstrated that he is ready for Genesis according to Webber by weeping his heart out over “Edward Scissorhands” and sighing a plaintive “Gone!” at the end of “Beauty and the Beast.”

Preview performances of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” continue through Wednesday. The show opens at 7 p.m. Thursday and continues through April 4. Tickets are $55, $50, $45 and $25. The Pantages Theater is at 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Call (213) 480-3232.