Despite all of the children in the school being around eight or nine, Maria Friedman's son Toby Sams Friedman, then four, was among the school children. He is the boy to whom she directly sings at the beginning.
Although the DVD was passed as "Exempt from classification" in the U.K., its depictions of Biblical characters smoking and drinking before an audience of schoolchildren rendered the decision controversial. In one scene, Joseph politely declines the offer of a cocktail.
"Coat of Many Colors" is a possible mistranslation. According to the eleventh-century scholar Muhammed Ibn Ibrahim Al-Thalabi, the original words were "garment with marks". (King James Bible translators added the word "many"). It is not certain what the "marks" were nor what they represented. A few controversial scholars believe that the garment may have been a symbol of Jacob's position as High Priest of the tribe, and that the older brothers were angry because Jacob chose to pass them over and give Joseph the priesthood instead of them.
The original West End production opened in 1972. The Broadway production of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" opened at the Royale Theater on January 27, 1982, ran for seven hundred forty-seven performances, and was nominated for the 1982 Tony Awards for the Best Musical, Book, and Score.
The frame of the story being performed for children in a school auditorium is a reference to the show's origin. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice originally wrote the piece as a 15 minute 'pop cantata' for the Colet Court prep school in London, where a friend of Webber's taught music. Eventually Webber and Rice expanded the piece into a full show.