Great Performances: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

The Narrator (Maria Friedman) draws a school audience repeatedly into a very twentieth century "Technicolor" production of the Biblical story. Patriarch Jacob (Sir Richard Attenborough) lived happily with his dozen sons, but his favoritism for bright Joseph (Donny Osmond), symbolized by the gift of a spectacular multi-colored coat, makes his brothers so jealous, they end up selling him as a slave, and staging his death. He rises in the service of wealthy Potiphar, though his adulterous wife is falsely accused and incarcerated. His gift of dream-telling however wins him Pharoah's (Robert Torti's) favor, in charge of planning for the seven years of extreme poverty after seven good ones he prophesied. When his brothers come to beg for food, it's time for reckoning and nobility.