A Terrific Joseph Playing in Deal That’s as Good for Parents as It Is for the Kids

Nov 15, 2026 by Two Sues On the Aisle

By The Jewish Voice and Opinion Staff

Taking a youngster to a live, professional show in a major auditorium is always an adventure. With its current superb production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s beloved Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, the Axelrod Performing Arts Center in Deal shows itself more than up to the task of delighting children and their parents. Playing until November 22, the show, first written by the teenaged Mr. Lloyd Webber with his equally young librettist, Tim Rice, in 1969 as a “pop cantata” for junior-high school boys to perform and mounted as a full-scale musical in 1974 in the UK, feels as fresh as it did when David Cassidy (remember him from The Partridge Family) and the esteemed Laurie Beechman, z”l, brought it to life on Broadway in the early 1980s.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

Happily, Axelrod’s production of the reimagining of the Biblical story of Jacob and his 12 sons works its charm the moment Joseph (David Smolokoff) launches into the powerful, iconic “Any Dream Will Do.” And when the narrator (Mary Bridget Davies) takes the audience “Way, way back, many centuries ago, not long after the Bible began, Jacob lived in the land of Canaan, a fine example of a family man,” one young first-timer, seven-year-old Emma Barat, whispered to her mom, “That’s Yaakov Avinu.”

Joseph was always one of those shows that made sure audiences knew Messrs. Lloyd Webber and Rice had had just as good a time writing it as the performers had putting it on and the audiences did watching it—and, sometimes, singing along. Musically, it is much more complex than the melodies let on, from Pharoah’s rock-and-roll pastiche (sung by Jimmy Helms with all of Elvis’s moves) to the country-western styled “One More Angel in Heaven” and the playful, syncopated Caribbean folk-rhythm of the Benjamin Calypso (“Oh, no, not he, how you can accuse him is a mystery. Leave him, take me, Benjamin is straighter than the tall palm tree”). The first act’s finale, “Close Every Door,” a poignant reminder that no matter what happens, Jews must remember “we have been promised a land of our own,” should be more familiar to every Jewish child than some of the silly pop coming out of Israel today.

Emma Barat with Mommy and Daddy,
There’s nothing like getting the star’s autograph from David Smolokoff

We all have reason to be grateful to Axelrod for introducing a new generation to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and reminding old-timers just how good this musical is when performed by a company as energetic and talented as the one currently assembled in Deal.